Historical comparison of gender inequality in scientific careers across countries and disciplines

Abstract

There is extensive, yet fragmented, evidence of gender differences in academia suggesting that women are underrepresented in most scientific disciplines and publish fewer articles throughout a career, and their work acquires fewer citations. Here, we offer a comprehensive picture of longitudinal gender differences in performance through a bibliometric analysis of academic publishing careers by reconstructing the complete publication history of over 1.5 million gender-identified authors whose publishing career ended between 1955 and 2010, covering 83 countries and 13 disciplines. We find that, paradoxically, the increase of participation of women in science over the past 60 years was accompanied by an increase of gender differences in both productivity and impact. Most surprisingly, though, we uncover two gender invariants, finding that men and women publish at a comparable annual rate and have equivalent career-wise impact for the same size body of work. Finally, we demonstrate that differences in publishing career lengths and dropout rates explain a large portion of the reported career-wise differences in productivity and impact, although productivity differences still remain. This comprehensive picture of gender inequality in academia can help rephrase the conversation around the sustainability of women’s careers in academia, with important consequences for institutions and policy makers.

Evaluating features of scientific conferences: A call for improvements

“…The current organization of many conferences leads to practices that exclude researchers on a wide range of factors including, but not limited to, gender, ethnic, socioeconomic, health and geographical backgrounds, and career stage (8). Women and researchers from racial and ethnic groups, who are under-represented in various fields, are the least likely to be offered opportunities to speak at meetings in their discipline (14,15). In-person conferences also harm the planet (Figures 1-2, Tables S2-S11) (8).…”

“…A conscious effort must be made by the organizers of every single conference to maintain fair representation and inclusion as overcoming such biases involves not just awareness but positive action (126). Unreasonable excuses for lack of diversity such as "there are not enough women in a field" are no longer acceptable, given recent increases of minority scientists in many scientific fields across graduate, postdoctoral and faculty career stages (15,127,128). The gender breakdown of the speakers and session chairs could reflect the actual attendance breakdown.…”

Sociality enhances survival in science, especially for female researchers

“…Previous studies have demonstrated the value of research collaborations for academic success ( 48,65–70) , and also that social strategies may differ between the genders 71–74 . However, the survivability of scientific careers has attracted only limited attention 1,75,76 , and the links between sociality, gender, and survival in science are completely unexplored. We used social network analyses to quantify the structural properties of egocentric co-authorship networks constructed from the publication records (>53,000 papers) of over 900 gender-identified international scientists, publishing over almost four decades.…”

“…We used social network analyses to quantify the structural properties of egocentric co-authorship networks constructed from the publication records (>53,000 papers) of over 900 gender-identified international scientists, publishing over almost four decades. In contrast to many previous studies, we made no restrictions in terms of career stage 72,74,77 , journal 69,78–80 , or institute 71 , and included both researchers who subsequently left science, and those who are still active 76 , allowing us to determine directly the effect of sociality on survival in science.…”

“…Importantly, since female researchers typically publish fewer papers than their male 71,76,77,79,80,93 , this study, we corrected the metrics we extracted from the social networks we constructed by controlling for variation in the number of papers that these focal authors published, thereby allowing us to account for the productivity gap between the genders. We calculated three measures of author sociality from these publication-corrected social metrics: collaborativeness, which describes the number of unique co-authors a focal author publishes with; consistency, which describes how often, on average, a focal author publishes with the same co-authors; and co-author connectedness, which describes how often the same co-authors appear together across the publications of a focal author.…”