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Historical comparison of gender inequality in scientific careers across countries and disciplines
Title / Series / Name
Publication Volume
Publication Issue
Pages
Editors
Keywords
Gender inequality
STEM
Science of science
Scientific careers
Multidisciplinary
SDG 5 - Gender Equality
STEM
Science of science
Scientific careers
Multidisciplinary
SDG 5 - Gender Equality
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14018/27152
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.
Topic
Publisher
Place of Publication
Type
Journal article
Date
2020-03-03
Language
ISBN
Identifiers
10.1073/pnas.1914221117