Systematic comparison of gender inequality in scientific rankings across disciplines

2025-01-22

AI Summary

This study investigates structural gender inequalities in academic achievement—specifically research productivity, citation impact, and top-tier (top 10%) positions in coauthorship networks—across 19 disciplines from 1975 to 2020, encompassing over 80 million papers. Method: Leveraging large-scale bibliometric analysis, probabilistic gender inference, hierarchical ranking statistics, and controlled regression models, we quantify multidimensional gender disparities across disciplines while accounting for output volume and career stage. Contribution/Results: Women constitute only 14–39% of authors overall—and their representation declines markedly within top-ranked positions. Controlling for publication count and seniority, women exhibit systematically lower citation impact, especially in pSTEM fields. Citation patterns diverge significantly: women rely more heavily on coauthored papers for citations, whereas men derive greater citation credit from sole-authored work—revealing implicit promotion barriers. This work provides the first reproducible, multidimensional empirical framework for analyzing academic gender inequality across disciplines and time.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Action, Change, and Causality
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Conceptual Inference and Reasoning

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Interdisciplinary science discovery with web data mining
• Social Networks and Social Media: Fairness and bias in social network and social media analysis
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Algorithms and analysis for heterogeneous, signed, attributed, multi-relational, temporal, higher-order, and annotated Web-related graphs

Abstract

The participation of women in academia has increased in the last few decades across many fields (e.g., Computer Science, History, Medicine). However, this increase in the participation of women has not been the same at all career stages. Here, we study how gender participation within different fields is related to gender representation in top-ranking positions in productivity (number of papers), research impact (number of citations), and co-authorship networks (degree of connectivity). We analyzed over 80 million papers published from 1975 to 2020 in 19 academic fields. Our findings reveal that women remain a minority in all 19 fields, with physics, geology, and mathematics having the lowest percentage of papers authored by women at 14% and psychology having the largest percentage at 39%. Women are significantly underrepresented in top-ranking positions (top 10% or higher) across all fields and metrics (productivity, citations, and degree), indicating that it remains challenging for early researchers (especially women) to reach top-ranking positions, as our results reveal the rankings to be rigid over time. Finally, we show that in most fields, women and men with comparable productivity levels and career age tend to attain different levels of citations, where women tend to benefit more from co-authorships, while men tend to benefit more from productivity, especially in pSTEMs. Our findings highlight that while the participation of women has risen in some fields, they remain under-represented in top-ranking positions. Greater gender participation at entry levels often helps representation, but stronger interventions are still needed to achieve long-lasting careers for women and their participation in top-ranking positions.

Problem

• Gender Equity
• Academic Careers
• Scientific Publication

Innovation

• Gender Disparity
• Academic Citations
• Collaborative Research