In any given year, the amount of published scientific research from women and men is about the same, but when examined over time, gender inequality persists.
Four scientists, Dr. Albert-László Barabási, Dr. Alexander J. Gates, Dr. Roberta Sinatra and Dr. Junming Huang, have taken a new approach to examining gender differences in scientific disciplines in academia. They had seen evidence that female scientists publish fewer articles throughout their careers and their work receives fewer citations. To build a comprehensive picture, they opted for a longitudinal analysis of academic publishing.
Reconstructing the complete publication history of more than 1.5 million gender-identified authors from 83 countries and 13 disciplines, the four scientists developed the report “Historical comparison of gender inequality in scientific careers across countries and disciplines.” They utilized the Web of Science database between 1900 and 2016 to examine the publication careers of authors whose careers had ended between 1955 and 2010.
The scientists found that men and women publish at a comparable annual rate and have a similar impact for the same size body of work. But despite the increase of women in the sciences over the past 60 years, gender disparities also increased in productivity and impact. The report noted that career length and dropout rates explain a large number of the differences.
Sinatra, an assistant professor at IT University of Copenhagen, said a female colleague had once told her that she had published many papers “for being a woman.”
“The expression ‘for being a woman’ hit me totally by surprise,” Sinatra said. “I considered myself usually on par with what my colleagues had achieved at my career stage. This is when I realized that I predominantly had male colleagues as a term of comparison—also due to the fact that there were not many women in my field.”
She said she was aware of gender bias in science but had never thought of the possibility of looking at the data for the differences in output — like annual publication rate — or for career features — like career length — to understand other differences.
