More women are starting their careers in science since 2000

A survey of the publishing records of millions of researchers around the world found that women are more likely to start a research career now than they were 20 years ago. However, they are less likely than their male counterparts to complete their academic careers, and they publish fewer papers in general.

Ludo Waltman, a quantitative scientist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and colleagues dug deep into Elsevier’s massive Scopus citation and abstract database. They examined the publications of over six million scholars worldwide who had published at least three papers between 1996 and 2018. The findings were published on the preprint service arXiv.org1.

The proportion of women starting a career in science has risen over time, according to the authors. Women made up 33% of researchers who started their publishing careers in 2000, and that number has risen to 40% in recent years. Despite the fact that the findings are not surprising, Waltman believes it is critical that we now have solid figures demonstrating the pattern across a wide range of countries and scientific disciplines.

In general, the study observed that men seemed to progress to senior roles more quickly. On average, they also published 15–20% more papers than did women over the time span of the data, though there is wide variation across different fields.

Although the overall picture for more women entering science appears to be favourable, Waltman points out that the gain is an average across several countries and scientific disciplines, and that there is a lot of variation within the numbers. He’s also quick to add that scientific careers entail more than just thousands of publications.

Source: Nature.com

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Written by Prakriti S