Men and Women Survivors in Science: A Comprehensive Analysis

TL;DR

This study analyzes gender disparities among scientists from 2000 to 2023, revealing a significant productivity gap but no gender differences in collaboration, journal choice, or citations across disciplines.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive, data-driven analysis of gender disparities in scientific publishing, highlighting where gaps exist and where they do not across multiple disciplines.

Findings

Men are approximately 23% more productive than women overall.

No significant gender differences in collaboration, journal selection, or citation impact.

High publication consistency among scientists, with 70-80% publishing annually.

Abstract

We followed scientists who started publishing in 2000 and who continued publishing until 2020-2023 (N = 41,424). These survivors in science authored 2 million articles (N = 2,089,097) with more than 70 million cited references (N = 73,118,395) and worked in 38 OECD countries. Using a raw Scopus dataset, we examined gender disparities in publishing intensity, international collaboration, journal selection, productivity, citations, team formation, and publishing breaks in 16 STEMM and social science disciplines. Several author-level metrics were computed. Our data show a gender productivity gap for both lifetime scholarly output and annual journal prestige-normalized productivity. Surprisingly, in the context of extant literature, the data do not show a gender international collaboration gap, a gender journal selection gap, a gender citation gap, or a gender team formation gap. Men were on average 23% more productive than women cumulatively in 2000-2023 and 19% more productive in the last 5 years studied (2019-2023). Men and women published in equally prestigious journals, received the same number of citations (field-normalized), and worked in equally sized teams. In all, 80% of scientists in STEMM disciplines and 70% in the social sciences had published every year. Our data indicate interesting disciplinary differences in gender disparities.