Marie Curie, Wikimedia, UnknownThe percentage of women authors in academic publishing has risen to 30 percent since 1665, but women are still less likely to be first or last author, and tend to cluster in sub-disciplines, according to researchers at the University of Washington who analyzed two million academic papers published from 1665 to 2010 by 2.7 million scientists, social scientists, and humanities scholars.
“The results show us what a lot of people have been saying and many of my female colleagues have been feeling,” environmental scientist Jennifer Jacquet of New York University, who was involved in the study, told The Chronicle of Higher Education. “Things are getting better for women in academia,” despite the fact that they are still not publishing at the same rate and level as their male counterparts.
Mining JSTOR, a digital archive of scholarly publications, the researchers tagged articles by field and subfield of research, then used data from the Social Security Administration to identify author age. Most importantly, they also tagged authors by gender, assuming that if a name was used 95 percent of the time for one gender it was probably accurate. ...
