The role of gender in scholarly authorship

Abstract

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, and it might be tempting to think that gender inequity will soon be a problem of the past. However, a large-scale analysis based on over eight million papers across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities reveals a number of understated and persistent ways in which gender inequities remain. For instance, 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.

Figure 1. Authorships and gender composition in the JSTOR network dataset, by decade.

Shaded bars represent male authorships, unshaded bars represent female authorships. The black line indicates the fraction of authorships that are women, the red line indicates the fraction of first authorships that are women, and the blue line indicates the fraction of last authorships that are women.

Figure 2. Even in fields with a gender composition near parity, men (blue bars) and women (pink bars) are unequally distributed in subfields.

Shown here is sociology and its subfields from 1990 to the present. An interactive version of this graph, covering all fields and subfields of the JSTOR network dataset, is available online at http://www.eigenfactor.org/gender/.

Figure 3. Gender as a function of authorship order across the entire JSTOR network dataset.

Top panel: 888,060 authorships prior to 1990. Bottom panel: 1,156,354 authorships from 1990 to the present. From 1990 to present, women are no longer severely underrepresented as first author, but they are increasingly underrepresented as last author. Error bars indicate one standard deviation of the binomial distribution. For the graph of author position, the solid line indicates the overall frequency of women in the JSTOR network dataset. For the last-author graph, the point indicates the frequency of women who are last author on papers with at least three authors. The horizontal line in this part of the graph indicates the appropriate comparator: the overall frequency of women in any authorship position on papers with three or more authors.

Figure 4. Gender as a function of authorship position in three domains of scholarship from 1990 to present: cell and molecular biology (276,992 authorships), sociology (44,895 authorships), and mathematics (6,134 authorships).

In molecular biology, women are overrepresented as first author but underrepresented at the last author position. In sociology, women are underrepresented in both first and last author positions. In mathematics, where the convention is for alphabetical author order , women are neither under- nor over-represented at first or last author positions.

Figure 5. Distribution of author number over time for the JSTOR corpus.

Multi-authored papers have increased over time while the fraction of single-authored papers have declined. The y-axis is the percentage of papers with the given number of authors. The legend shows “A”, the number of authors on a paper.