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

Junming Huang, Alexander J. Gates, Roberta Sinatra and Albert-László Barabási ()
Additional contact information
Junming Huang: Network Science Institute and Department of Physics, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115; CompleX Lab, School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China; Paul and Marcia Wythes Center on Contemporary China, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540
Alexander J. Gates: Network Science Institute and Department of Physics, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115
Roberta Sinatra: Department of Computer Science, IT University of Copenhagen, 2300 Copenhagen, Denmark; ISI Foundation, 10126 Turin, Italy
Albert-László Barabási: Network Science Institute and Department of Physics, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115; Channing Division of Network Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115; Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115; Department of Network and Data Science, Central European University, 1051 Budapest, Hungary

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2020, vol. 117, issue 9, 4609-4616

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.

Keywords: gender inequality; science of science; STEM; scientific careers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (64)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.pnas.org/content/117/9/4609.full (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nas:journl:v:117:y:2020:p:4609-4616

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Bibliographic data for series maintained by PNAS Product Team ().