The gender gap in science: How long until women are equally represented?

Women comprise a minority of the Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine (STEMM) workforce. Quantifying the gender gap may identify fields that will not reach parity without intervention, reveal underappreciated biases, and inform benchmarks for gender balance among conference speakers, editors, and hiring committees. Using the PubMed and arXiv databases, we estimated the gender of 36 million authors from >100 countries publishing in >6000 journals, covering most STEMM disciplines over the last 15 years, and made a web app allowing easy access to the data (https://lukeholman.github.io/genderGap/). Despite recent progress, the gender gap appears likely to persist for generations, particularly in surgery, computer science, physics, and maths. The gap is especially large in authorship positions associated with seniority, and prestigious journals have fewer women authors. Additionally, we estimate that men are invited by journals to submit papers at approximately double the rate of women. Wealthy countries, notably Japan, Germany, and Switzerland, had fewer women authors than poorer ones. We conclude that the STEMM gender gap will not close without further reforms in education, mentoring, and academic publishing.

女性在科学、技术、工程、数学与医学（Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine，简称STEMM）从业者队伍中占少数。量化性别差距，有助于识别出若不采取干预措施便无法实现性别均等的领域，揭示未被充分认知的偏见，并为会议发言人、编辑及招聘委员会的性别平衡设定参考基准。本研究依托PubMed与arXiv数据库，对过去15年间覆盖绝大多数STEMM学科、来自100余个国家、发表于6000余种期刊的3600万位作者的性别进行了估算，并开发了一款可便捷访问该数据的网页应用（https://lukeholman.github.io/genderGap/）。尽管近期取得了一定进展，性别差距似乎仍将持续数代人之久，在外科、计算机科学、物理学与数学领域尤为显著。该差距在与资深作者身份相关的署名位置中尤为突出，且高影响力期刊中的女性作者占比更低。此外，我们估算得出，期刊邀请男性作者投稿的速率约为女性的两倍。富裕国家（尤其是日本、德国与瑞士）的女性作者占比低于较贫穷国家。本研究结论表明，若不在教育、导师指导与学术出版领域推行进一步改革，STEMM领域的性别差距将无法得到缩小。