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For a long time, many women scientists have seen their contribution to research minimized or even denied. If this phenomenon tends to be reversed, women researchers remain under-represented compared to their male counterparts in specialized publications.
Parity reached in 2158 in physics research
Cassidy Sugimoto and Vincent Larivière, scientists who respectively teach at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and at the University of Montreal, have studied the ratio of women to men in scientific research. They analyzed nearly 5.5 million articles published between 2008 and 2020, with the help of a machine learning algorithm, in order to estimate the probability that the name of their authors belongs to a man or a woman. woman.
Researchers have found that the percentage of women credited in scientific publications is increasing every year, as they explained to the journal New Scientist. Thus, 43% of authors who contributed to writings on psychology were women in 2008, compared to 50% in 2021.
Based on these results, Cassidy Sugimoto and Vincent Larivière estimate that gender parity will be reached in scientific articles on biology in 2069. It will take until 2087 for female researchers to publish as much work on chemistry as their male colleagues. . But this is nothing compared to research in the fields of engineering sciences, mathematics or physics. Inequalities will persist until 2144, or even 2158 in the case of global physics research.
Systemic inequalities in many areas
The results of the empirical study of the binomial will be published on March 21 in the book “Equity for Women in Science: Dismantling Systemic Barriers to Advancement” (Harvard University Press). This book examines the existence of significant discrimination against women in global research. “It’s not domain specific”Vincent Larivière told New Scientist. “The problem really arises in all disciplines [scientifiques]”.
The duo had already highlighted this phenomenon in a large-scale assessment, whose results were published in the journal Nature in 2013. We could learn that researchers who manage to publish articles as a privileged contributor (sole author, first author or last author) tend to be cited less subsequently than their counterparts males in similar positions. This lack of citations is not without consequence given the role these citations play in the evaluation of scientists and, by extension, in the advancement of their careers.
There are many reasons for these imbalances in global research, including the strength of stereotypes, the unconsciously sexist behavior of some researchers heading research units or laboratories, and the low presence of women in scientific studies and professions.
For Cassidy Sugimoto, it is important for the scientific community to overcome these inequalities. “The diversity of the scientific community changes the content of research and makes it more representative of the population”she explained to New Scientist. “This widens the range of possible questions.”