What will it take to close the gender gap in science?
An analysis of 10 million scientific articles shows that closing the persistent gender gap in science will require reform in education, mentoring and scientific publishing.
Especially at senior levels, there are few women in the Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine (STEMM) workforce. This study examined gender differences in scientific papers published by 36 million authors from various countries across 6000 journals, using PubMed and arXiv databases. While the number of women authors has increased acoss journals, many research specialties, such as surgery, physics, and computer science, still have a significant gender gap in publications. For example, the estimated time to achieve gender parity in senior roles in physics is more than 200 years.
The gap is most prominent in authorship positions associated with seniority, and in prestigious journals. Furthermore, wealthier countries like Japan, Germany, and Switzerland have a more pronounced gender gap than poorer countries. Men are twice as likely as women to receive an invitation by a journal to submit a paper. The dataset in the study can be easily explored using a simple web app: https://lukeholman.github.io/genderGap/. The results encourage and support a need for further reforms in education, mentoring, and academic publishing to ensure a more just future for women in academic STEMM publishing.
Study Details
Sample size(s): 36 million authors from >100 countries publishing in >6000 journals
Participants: Journals covering STEMM disciplines over the last 15 years
Design: Quantitative and qualitative meta-analysis
Reference:
Holman, L., Stuart-Fox, D., & Hauser, C. E. (2018). The gender gap in science: How long until women are equally represented?. PLoS biology, 16(4), e2004956.
Summarized by: Bianca Dreyer, Emily Ana Butler & Nardin Ayoub
