More Women Than Ever Are Starting Careers In Science

Women are more likely to start out a search career now than they were 20 years ago, reveals a longitudinal study of the publishing records of many researchers round the world. But they’re less likely to continue their academic careers than are their male contemporaries, and generally publish fewer papers.

Ludo Waltman, a quantitative scientist at Leiden University within the Netherlands, and his colleagues took a deep dive into the large Scopus citation and abstract database, hosted by Elsevier. They checked out the publication careers of some six million researchers globally who had authored a minimum of three papers between 1996 and 2018. The team posted its findings on the preprint server arXiv.org1.

The authors found that the proportion of girls starting a career in science rose over time. In 2000, 33% of researchers starting their publishing career were women; that grew to 40% in recent years (see ‘Gender gap’). Waltman says that although the results aren’t surprising, it’s important that we now have concrete statistics confirming the trend for several countries and scientific disciplines.

In the physical sciences, mathematics and engineering, male authors still made up a way higher proportion of authors than did women, even in additional recent years (see ‘Differences by discipline’).

Career progression
Waltman and his team took their work further by tracking the researchers’ publication records to ascertain whether or not they continued authoring scientific papers — a proxy for continuing a career in science. they found that ladies were less likely to continue publishing papers than were men, whatever year they began their careers.

But Waltman says his team was surprised — as long as there’s a well known problem of fewer women than men getting to senior roles in science — that ladies were only slightly less likely to still publish papers than were men. They found that 54% of girls who started publishing in 2000 had dropped out 15 years later, as against 52% of men.

Nevertheless, “while the length of the scientific careers of men and ladies is sort of similar, there are important differences between men and ladies within the way during which their scientific careers develop”, he says. generally , men appeared to reach senior roles — roughly judged by appearing because the last author on a paper — more quickly. on the average , they also published 15–20% more papers than did women over the time span of the info , though there’s wide variation across different fields.

One important limitation of the study was that it excluded data from India and China — which together account for around one-third of the world’s population — because the authors’ algorithms struggled to assign gender unambiguously to names from these nations. It also didn’t account for non-binary authors.

Positive picture

Flaminio Squazzoni, a sociologist at the University of Milan in Italy, agrees that the shortage of knowledge from India and China may be a big gap. “It is probable that if we might have data on these two countries, the attitude on women academics might be slightly worse,” Squazzoni predicts.

Nevertheless, “it’s an honest study” and therefore the Scopus database may be a rich source of data , says Squazzoni. His own team published work this year showing that there’s little gender bias in peer-review processes2. That, combined with this latest study, suggests that investments in gender-diversity schemes in science might be paying off, he says.

Waltman says that although the general picture looks positive for more women entering science, it’s important to recollect that the rise is a mean over many countries and scientific disciplines, which there’s huge variation within the numbers. he’s also keen to means that scientific careers are about quite publication numbers. “The bibliometric lens through which many studies, including our own, check out diversity in science may be a very narrow one,” he says.