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

2019/07/09 by Junming Huang, Alexander J. Gates, Roberta Sinatra +2 · 1 voice · 951 citations
Computer Science · Decision Sciences · Mathematics · Medicine · Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Demographic economics #Diversity and Career in Medicine #Economics #Gender inequality #Health and Medical Research Impacts #Inequality #Mathematics #Political science #Social science #Sociology #cs.DL #physics.soc-ph #scientometrics and bibliometrics research

paper · pdf · doi:10.1073/pnas.1914221117

published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117(9), 4609-4616 (National Academy of Sciences)

arxiv published 2019/07/09 · arxiv updated 2019/07/09 · openalex publication_date 2020/02/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06

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.

Citations

• The journal coverage of Web of Science and Scopus: a comparative analysis
• Power-Law Distributions in Empirical Data
• National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track
• Bibliometrics: Global gender disparities in science
• The role of gender in scholarly authorship
• Gender Differences in Productivity
• Inequality quantified: Mind the gender gap
• The Matilda Effect in science: Awards and prizes in the US, 1990s and 2000s

Cited by

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• From Funding Equity Initiatives to Research Productivity: Quantifying the Impact of NSF ADVANCE Awards on Recipients’ Publication Trajectories

Discussions

• Gender inequality in scientific careers across countries and disciplines [hn, 1 points, 1 comments]

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