Mid-career field switches reduce gender disparities in academic publishing

Abstract

The continuing low proportions of females in most STEM fields in many countries is an ongoing concern, with no agreement about the fundamental causes or effective remedial actions. One previous study has found that professional females are more likely to switch from a (not necessarily academic) STEM career than professional females in comparable non-STEM jobs, reducing the overall numbers of STEM females. This study investigates whether the same is true for long term academics, and hence could partly account for current gender disparities. Based on the Scopus subject categories of the first and last five publications 2001-2018 of people in 31 countries with publishing careers starting after 2000, female researchers switching fields mid-career tend to move to fields with fewer females, relative to males switching fields mid-career. Thus, mid-career field changes within academia do not help to explain continuing gender disparities in publishing and other explanations must be sought.

The Journey of Women's Career to Top Management: A Systematic Literature Review using PRISMA

“…Previous literature also shows that gender discrimination hinders the advancement of women's careers (Zainuddin & Talib, 2018). This causes difficulties for women to be employed, promoted and to get salary increments (Goy et al, 2018;Lopez et al, 2020;Thelwall, 2020). Besides that, the working culture that do not support the development of women's career will greatly influence the motivation levels of women within the organization (Kapur et al, 2016).…”