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Medical science is neglecting female talent, a new study suggests.

New research reveals that women are significantly underrepresented in academic medicine. Researchers said this is important because not having enough women could result in a waste public investment due to loss of research talent. This is because not having enough women in the field means that some areas of medicine get less attention, which is a loss for both patients and society.

Despite a substantial decrease in traditional discrepancies between men and women in recent years, lead researcher Professor Jonathan Gran and his team from King's College London believe that discriminatory practices and traditional discrepancies and unconscious bias continue to influence medicine.

"There has been a longstanding gender imbalance in clinical academia as well as laboratory-based basic medical sciences," Grant, Director of the Policy Institute at King's College London, said in a news release.. "This inequality increases substantially with seniority, with women representing only 15% of professors in UK medical schools."

"The lack of women participating in the clinical academic research system is likely to be implicitly biasing today's research agenda and, by consequence, tomorrow's clinical practice," co-researcher Chief Medical Officer Professor Dame Sally Davies said in a news release.

"The system needs to be reformed by medical schools improving the culture for and chances of women in clinical academia, through schemes such as Athena Swan. The adoption and embedding of gender neutral policies, for example flexible working, will be of benefit to all clinical academics whether women or men," she added.

The article was published in the July issue of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.