Gender Publication Gap

Despite the increasing number of women working in STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), a significant underrepresentation persists, particularly in permanent academic positions. Successful academic careers are strongly tied to a prolific scholarly record; scientific publications are not only the major outlet for scholarly communication, they are regarded as a proxy for a researcher’s scientific credo and play a key role in achieving and maintaining a successful career in academia.

This website provides visualizations of publication data from STEM disciplines in relation to the gender of the publishing authors. Building on previous work where we analyzed the effect of gender on publication practices in Mathematics using the zbMATH data repository, our visualizations address several crucial aspects for understanding the impact of publication patterns on the gender gap: research activity over time, share of women and men in different journals, distribution across sub-fields, and the joint impact of gender and geographical location.

Our aim is to contribute to a better understanding of the interplay between a scientist’s gender and their scholarly output. By providing interactive visualizations we want to enable scientists, scientific organizations and policy makers to explore the data, formulate new hypotheses, and derive evidence for informed decisions.

Subjects

Publications within a scientific field are typically subclassified into subjects according to various hierarchical and discipline-specific schemas. We break down bibliographic records by their topical classification, which allows to study proportions of women and men in different subfields.

Journals

Academic articles reach the community by means of being published in scientific journals, which are typically peer-reviewed and subject to scrutiny by an editorial board. By presenting bibliographic records split by publication venue it is possible to analyze the gender of the authors accepted for publication on a given journal.

Locations

A significant topic in the study of gender and bibliographic data is the relevance of the geographical location where research is produced. By extracting country-level information from authors' affiliations, it is possible to investigate gender differences by country. This allows to compare the relative share of men and women researchers in different parts of the world.

Cohorts

Authors are assigned to a given cohort according to the year of first recorded publication, which acts as an approximation for the beginning of their scientific career. We follow the publication records of all authors in every cohort who continued publishing for at least a certain number of years after their first paper, which can serve as a proxy for the career stage.