A recent paper by Holman et al. in PLOS Biology presents a new look at the gender gap in publications for millions of authors from over one hundred countries in over six thousand journals. You can interact with the data through their web app.
The gender gap in science: How long until women are equally represented?
Luke Holman, Devi Stuart-Fox, Cindy E. Hauser, PLOS Biology 2018.
The authors present the current author gender ratio, its rate of change per year, and the estimate number of years until the gender ratio comes with 5% of parity. A few notes below the image…
Here are the first things I noticed:
- The estimated percent of women authors “maxes out” at 50% (there’s a Figure 2 that includes fields with a higher percentage of women).
- arXiv.org – the preprint server that began as a mathematics and physics venue – has particularly poor percent of women authors.
- First author percentages tend to be “ahead of the curve” for each discipline, while last authors lag behind the numbers for all authors. In many fields, first authors denote who did the most work, and last authors denote who funded the work. My hunch is that a higher proportion of women get papers as graduate students and postdocs, whereas fewer women make it to senior-level faculty as heads of a lab.
- On a positive note, more women are publishing in the fields than before (the rate of change is mostly positive).
The paper’s supplementary figure S3 shows data for Computer Science (from arXiv). Based on current trajectories, only two sub-categories (Information Theory and Robotics) hope to see gender parity within the next 50-100 years. We still have a long way to go.
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