Gender Gap in All Academic Fields Over Time

Academic publishing gender gap has been surprisingly under covered across all disciplines and over a longer timeframe. Our study fills this gap, by analyzing how the proportions of women authors change in academic publications over 20 years in all fields from 31,219 journals from 2001 to 2021. Our results indicate that the ratio of female to male authors keeps increasing steadily across disciplines. The increases are field-neutral—in other words, they are not bigger, for example, in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, in spite of multiple initiatives focusing specifically on STEM. The increases are also decelerating in time, which could suggest that the equilibrium of female to male authors may be plateauing. Finally, although the within-field gender gap is decreasing, it actually widened between fields. Thus, our results have major consequences for science policy in the area of the gender gap.