👫 Gap between men and women in science is closing

Men have dominated the scientific world for a long time, as in the number of held positions and the number of published scientific papers. But this gap is slowly but steadily closing.

Chemistry World reports that scientists have looked at statistics around published scientific papers across all scientific fields and all countries. The goal was to get insights into the gender balance in publishing. In the study that covered six million researchers, the database Scopus was leveraged. To determine the gender of the researcher the scientists used the first name and the country of origin. The name and country were then run through three different gender determining tools, to get the highest possible accuracy.

In the longitudinal study, they looked at several different factors. One was the balance between sexes at the start of a career as a publishing researcher. Back in 2000, there were four or five men for every two women, but in recent times, there were three men for every two women. For all fields except nursing, the percentages of women who started their careers as publishing scientists were higher in 2010 than in 2000.

The biggest difference was seen in chemical engineering, environmental science, and psychology; in all these fields, the increase in women starting a publishing career was 12 percent between 2000 and 2010.

Noteworthy is that men still dominate when it comes to publishing scientific papers, but the trend is slowly shifting.