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The gender gap in science: How long until women are equally represented?

Luke Holman | Devi Stuart-Fox | Cindy E Hauser
PLoS biology | 2018

Women comprise a minority of the Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine (STEMM) workforce. Quantifying the gender gap may identify fields that will not reach parity without intervention, reveal underappreciated biases, and inform benchmarks for gender balance among conference speakers, editors, and hiring committees. Using the PubMed and arXiv databases, we estimated the gender of 36 million authors from >100 countries publishing in >6000 journals, covering most STEMM disciplines over the last 15 years, and made a web app allowing easy access to the data (https://lukeholman.github.io/genderGap/). Despite recent progress, the gender gap appears likely to persist for generations, particularly in surgery, computer science, physics, and maths. The gap is especially large in authorship positions associated with seniority, and prestigious journals have fewer women authors. Additionally, we estimate that men are invited by journals to submit papers at approximately double the rate of women. Wealthy countries, notably Japan, Germany, and Switzerland, had fewer women authors than poorer ones. We conclude that the STEMM gender gap will not close without further reforms in education, mentoring, and academic publishing.

Pubmed ID: 29672508

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PubMed (tool)

RRID:SCR_004846

Public bibliographic database that provides access to citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full-text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites. PubMed citations and abstracts include fields of biomedicine and health, covering portions of life sciences, behavioral sciences, chemical sciences, and bioengineering. Provides access to additional relevant web sites and links to other NCBI molecular biology resources. Publishers of journals can submit their citations to NCBI and then provide access to full-text of articles at journal web sites using LinkOut.

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DOAJ - Directory of Open Access Journals (tool)

RRID:SCR_004521

Database providing access to quality controlled Open Access Journals. For a journal to be included it should exercise quality control on submitted papers through an editor, editorial board and/or a peer-review system. It is not be limited to particular languages or subject areas. Offering free online access to high quality full text content, plus excellent search tools, the portal enables researchers to find, use and re-use a vast range of materials with ease. The content of DOAJ will be even more visible and disseminated through this portal. The aim of the Directory is to increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific and scholarly journals thereby promoting their increased usage and impact. As of April 2014, DOAJ has 9,709 journals, 5,624 journals searchable at article level, 133 Countries and 1,600,991 articles. The database may be browsed by title or subject, or searched through the interface to for journals or articles.

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MEDLINE (tool)

RRID:SCR_002185

A premier bibliographic database that contains over 18 million references to journal articles in life sciences with a concentration on biomedicine. A distinctive feature is that the records are indexed with NLM Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). PubMed provides free access to MEDLINE and links to full text articles when possible. The great majority of journals are selected for MEDLINE based on the recommendation of the Literature Selection Technical Review Committee (LSTRC), an NIH-chartered advisory committee of external experts analogous to the committees that review NIH grant applications. Some additional journals and newsletters are selected based on NLM-initiated reviews, e.g., history of medicine, health services research, AIDS, toxicology and environmental health, molecular biology, and complementary medicine, that are special priorities for NLM or other NIH components. These reviews generally also involve consultation with an array of NIH and outside experts or, in some cases, external organizations with which NLM has special collaborative arrangements. MEDLINE is the primary component of PubMed, part of the Entrez series of databases provided by the NLM National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). MEDLINE may also be searched via the NLM Gateway. Time coverage: generally 1946 to the present, with some older material. Source: Currently, citations from approximately 5,516 worldwide journals in 39 languages; 60 languages for older journals. Citations for MEDLINE are created by the NLM, international partners, and collaborating organizations.

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MeSH (tool)

RRID:SCR_004750

A controlled vocabulary thesaurus that consists of sets of terms naming descriptors in a hierarchical structure that permits searching at various levels of specificity. MeSH, in machine-readable form, is provided at no charge via electronic means. MeSH descriptors are arranged in both an alphabetic and a hierarchical structure. At the most general level of the hierarchical structure are very broad headings such as Anatomy or Mental Disorders. More specific headings are found at more narrow levels of the twelve-level hierarchy, such as Ankle and Conduct Disorder. There are 27,149 descriptors in 2014 MeSH. There are also over 218,000 entry terms that assist in finding the most appropriate MeSH Heading, for example, Vitamin C is an entry term to Ascorbic Acid. In addition to these headings, there are more than 219,000 headings called Supplementary Concept Records (formerly Supplementary Chemical Records) within a separate thesaurus. The MeSH thesaurus is used by NLM for indexing articles from 5,400 of the world''''s leading biomedical journals for the MEDLINE/PubMED database. It is also used for the NLM-produced database that includes cataloging of books, documents, and audiovisuals acquired by the Library. Each bibliographic reference is associated with a set of MeSH terms that describe the content of the item. Similarly, search queries use MeSH vocabulary to find items on a desired topic.

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arXiv (tool)

RRID:SCR_006500

Electronic archive and distribution server for research articles providing open access to more than 850,000 e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics. Users can retrieve papers via the web interface. Registered authors may use the web interface to submit their articles to arXiv. Authors can also update their submissions if they choose, though previous versions remain available. Listings of newly submitted articles in areas of interest are available via the web interface, via RSS feeds, and by subscription to automatic email alerts.

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