An examination of 5.8 million authors across the entire spectrum of scientific disciplines reveals a promising trend of a narrowing gender gap, indicating that significant strides have been made. The recent study led by John Ioannidis from the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICs) at Stanford University, US, along with his team, was released on November 21st in the open-access journal PLOS Biology, offering a beacon of hope for a more equitable scientific community.
Science continues to exhibit a pronounced gender divide, evident in numerous facets. Among these, the differential visibility of male and female scientists in their work’s prominence in scientific publications stands out significantly.
The research scrutinized the comprehensive Scopus database, encompassing articles from all areas of science. This database accounted for 5.8 million authors whose gender could be determined with high confidence. Among these, men constituted 3.8 million and women 2.0 million.
The findings indicated a male predominance, with men outnumbering women by a factor of 3.93 among authors who began their publishing careers before 1992. Still, this ratio dropped to 1.36 for those who commenced after 2011. Nevertheless, focusing on authors with the most significant impact (those within the top 2% in their field based on citation metrics), men still outnumbered women by 3.21 times among the most-cited authors. This disparity decreased from 6.41 times among the more senior groups to 2.28 times among the newest cohort, who started publishing post-2011. In this youngest group, 32 out of 174 scientific fields (18%) featured an equal number of women and men, or more women, among the top-cited authors.
The gap in gender representation among authors has markedly narrowed over time in affluent countries like the USA. However, the latter showed minimal progress concerning top-cited authors’ gender imbalances. An in-depth review of random samples of 100 women and 100 men from the newest group revealed that advancement to full professorship was exceedingly rare. At the same time, most were engaged in academia as of 2023. The researchers contend that improvements are needed in addressing gender disparities and the slow progression routes for highly talented scientists, irrespective of gender.
Ioannidis highlighted, “Our research captures a significant reduction over time in the gender-based inequalities among the upper tiers of scientific citation impact. However, considerable scope remains for further advancements in the majority of scientific domains.”
More information: John P. A. Ioannidis et al, Gender imbalances among top-cited scientists across scientific disciplines over time through the analysis of nearly 5.8 million authors, PLoS Biology. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3002385
Journal information: PLoS Biology Provided by PLOS
