Unveiling the loss of exceptional women in science

Abstract

The slower career advancement of women hampers diversity and jeopardizes female leadership, resulting in significant setbacks for the academic community. Our study constructed a more comprehensive dataset than previous studies, encompassing 24,292,991 complete careers of scholars across 19 scientific disciplines from 1950 to 2015. By employing a combination of survival model and relative dropout rate calculations, we identified unified career stages across fields: rapid decrease (RD), stable decrease (SD), and unstable increase (UI). Through gender comparison under meticulous matching within each career stage, our analysis revealed that women in the RD stage, characterized by higher dropout rates, demonstrated a significantly higher or comparable impact than men in most fields. Conversely, persistent women exhibited a comparable impact to men. These findings highlight a more nuanced gender-based phenomenon, extending beyond the commonly observed lower proportion of female scholars or higher female dropout rates. In contrast to the static analyses employed in previous studies on dropout rates, our research introduced intergenerational relationships between dropout rates and scholars' scientific performance. The results demonstrate that, over generations, a minimum of four publications within their ten years become necessary to decrease dropout rates, accompanied by a gradual reduction in gender differences. In fact, early-career female dropouts are now approaching or even surpassing the impact of their male counterparts in most fields. Notably, the significance of research quality is particularly pronounced for junior scholars in the soft sciences compared to those in the hard sciences. We believe the outcomes of this research offer a fresh perspective that deepens our understanding of the challenges faced by female scholars in the scientific community.