Major Report Documents the Status of Women in Academic Research

A new study by the major academic publisher Elsevier, tracks the progress of women in 12 countries who published research papers in 27 different fields. The report finds that women make up at least 40 percent of all published researchers in nine of the 12 countries studied. Fifteen years ago, women were 40 percent of all authors of research papers in only one of the 12 countries.

Among some of the key findings in the report are:

• Women publish fewer research papers on average than men, but there is no evidence that this affects how their papers are cited or downloaded.
• Women are less likely than men to collaborate internationally on research papers.
• Women are slightly less likely than men to collaborate across the academic and corporate sectors on research papers.
• In general, women’s scholarly output includes a slightly larger proportion of highly interdisciplinary research than men’s.

There were wide disparities in the gender gap among authors of research papers depending on the field. For example. in medicine there were 498,000 men who published papers in the field between 2011 and 2015. During this period there were nearly 417,000 women authors. In contrast, there were 258,000 men listed as authors in published papers in engineering compared to just 68,000 women.

Women had more authors of research papers than men only in the fields of nursing and psychology. The report also showed that women are only 14 percent of inventors and 23 percent of all researchers who filed patent applications.

The full 96-page report, Gender in Global Research Landscape, may be downloaded by clicking here.