Today, I again used data from the literature tracking tool Academic Sequitur, this time to examine some gender patterns in publishing across fields. I took article data from 2018-2020 and estimated the share of female authorships for 38 different research fields, as determined by the field of each journal.* I excluded names that could not be classified as female or male; thus, the share female and share male add up to 1 in each case.
What are the most male-dominated fields? Mathematics barely clears 20 percent female authors, with computer science and finance close behind (or ahead?). Economics just makes it over the 25 percent hurdle and has fewer female authors than engineering. Business does slightly better, with 32 percent female authors. Archeology rounds out this group with just under 40 percent women.
The bottom half of the male-dominated scale has many fields with that are right around 40 percent female, including urban studies, neuroscience, epidemiology, health policy and pharmacology. Finally, three fields have a greater than 50-50 female representation: demography (60.0 percent female), social work (65.7 percent women), and gender studies (66.0 percent female).
Although a few research fields were excluded from this analysis for conciseness, it’s pretty clear that gender parity has a long way to go in academia in the vast majority of fields, even if we look at the most recent data.
* A journal may belong to more than one field. Highly multidisciplinary journals, such as Nature, Science, and PNAS, were excluded from the sample.
