Women are still under-represented as authors in scientific publications across many fields.Credit: Thomas Koehler/Photothek/Getty
It’s no secret that women’s participation in research is not reflected in the literature on a par with men’s, and that other gender identities are all but invisible. The gap is particularly wide in some disciplines, notably the physical sciences (T. Berry and S. Mordijck Commun. Phys. 7, 77; 2024), as well as at more-senior levels. But are some fields making more progress than others? If so, what can be learnt from them — and equally from fields in which trends are worsening? These are some of the questions that reporters and data analysts from Nature Index set out to investigate in their project, Nature Index Author Gender Ratio, launched in 2024. This week, they report some early results.
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With some help from artificial-intelligence software that predicted an author’s gender on the basis of their name and location history (see go.nature.com/4kxhkda), the team analysed the gender of around 1.5 million authors of studies published between 2015 and 2024 in 145 high-quality journals in the natural and health sciences. The analysis counts authorship instances rather than individual authors and so reflects publication activity rather than a strict headcount of individuals. The data are a first approximation and exclude the majority of authors based in China. The team is working on ways to include more in the next iteration.
According to the model, some 29% of the authors in the 2024 data set were women, a proportion that is broadly in line with other analyses, for example from the United Nations education and science agency, UNESCO. Most research areas recorded some increase in female authorship over the data period, but for the vast majority, it was less than 5 percentage points.
The Index data set shows a mismatch between the biological sciences and the physical sciences. In 2024, women comprised 53% of authorship of assessed studies in reproductive medicine, and 50% of authorship in the fields of paediatrics and nutrition, and dietetics. By contrast, classical physics (15%), quantum physics (16%) and condensed-matter physics (16%) had among the lowest rates of female authorship.
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This kind of data set allows for more-granular analyses and opens the way for further study of the reasons for particular results. Reproductive medicine, for example, showed a marked increase in female authorship from 44% in 2015 to 53% in 2023. Three fields — sports science and exercise; epidemiology; and medical microbiology — increased their female authorship rates by 7 points each in that period. That tipped epidemiology and medical microbiology just inside the zone defined as gender parity (40–60% gender balance). Other fields, however, went into reverse after recording an increase. Classical physics, for example, recorded an increase from 10% in 2015 to 20% in 2023, before dipping back to 15% in 2024.
The data set also allows users to explore how disciplines are performing in different countries. In 2024, authors based in the United States, France and Canada had the highest percentage of women among research-intensive nations: 34% for each country. The United Kingdom comes in at 29% and India at 28%. Japan has among the lowest proportion of female authorship, at 16%. The United States and India are the among the countries on an upwards trajectory. Overall, the United States saw an 8-point increase from 2015 to 2024 and India a 7-point increase. The gap also narrowed in South Korea, although by only 2 points during the same period, to 23%.
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In that national breakdown, there are intriguing differences by discipline. For example, in the United States in 2024, nanotechnology recorded 22% female authorship, higher than the global proportion for the field (19%), with India at 25%. In mathematical physics in Canada, female authorship was at 20% in 2024, but in the United States, it was at 11% and in the United Kingdom just 6%.
Providing data at the field or country level is what will allow individual disciplinary communities to not only know what is happening inside their fields, but also understand the reasons for the trends, mark successes, study how to do better and, crucially, learn from each other.
The work we are publishing today is a start. The Nature Index team will continue refining and building on it, and we encourage our readers to contact us with suggestions for how to improve our analysis. We plan, for example, to include journal-level data, which will reveal which publications are outperforming their peers in achieving author gender parity.
The better the access to information that lays bare the inequities faced by women in pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, especially for positions of influence and leadership, the better equipped society will be to push back on unfair, antiquated systems and build a stronger research environment for all.
