The Gender Gap in Scientists Leaving Academia Has Narrowed

In an examination of more than 375,000 scientists across the globe, a new study published inthe journal Higher Education has found roughly one third of published authors quit science within five years of publishing their first paper. Within a decade, that rate jumps to roughly half of all academic scientists.

The study consisted of two cohorts of scientists who began publishing academic research in 2000 and 2010, respectively. The authors tracked both cohorts’ frequency of publications through 2019. For the first group, about one third of the cohort stopped publishing within five years, about half quit within 10 years, and nearly two-thirds quit within 19 years. Women authors in the 2000 cohort were more likely to quit over the same time period. Although a similar rate of overall attrition was found among the 2010 cohort, the gender gap in scientists quitting their field was virtually nonexistent. By 2019, some 41 percent of women and 42 percent of men were still actively publishing research.

The rate of attrition among the 2000 cohort varied depending on the participants’ field of study. In the biological and life sciences discipline, a primarily woman-dominated field, women were significantly more likely to exit their field after 10 years at a rate of 58.3 percent, compared to 48.6 percent of men. In contrast, some fields where women remain historically underrepresented, such as mathematics, computer science, and physics, the rate of attrition after 10 years was roughly same between women and men scholars.

“For new generations of scientists, attrition in science has been on the rise and very high, but it seems to be much less gendered than traditionally assumed,” the authors write. “In a fast-changing science environment, with hundreds of thousands of newcomers to science every year, our traditional assumptions about how men and women disappear from science may need careful revision.”