Although gender disparities appear to be decreasing in academia according to a number of metrics, such as grant funding, hiring, acceptance at scholarly journals, and productivity, a large-scale analysis that examined more than eight million papers across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities reveals a number of understated and persistent ways in which gender inequities remain.
The authors of the study, including SFI External Professor Carl Bergstrom, note that even where raw publication counts seem to be equal between genders, close inspection reveals that, in certain fields, men predominate in the prestigious first and last author positions. Moreover, women are significantly underrepresented as authors of single-authored papers.
Academics should be aware of the subtle ways that gender disparities can occur in scholarly authorship, they say.
Read the paper in PLOS One (July 22, 2013)