Women are listed as authors of just 30% of academic research from British universities, according to a major new ranking of higher education institutions.
Although the number of women named as authors is gradually increasing, the slow pace was described by one expert as “disheartening”. The 30% figure is for studies published between 2014 and 2017, which is an improvement from an average of just under 26% between 2006 and 2009.
Trends in the UK are comparable with other research-intensive countries. For instance, 31.8% of research papers published between 2014 and 2017 in the US had female authors, while Germany’s figure is 25.7%.
The UK’s small increase was “quite disheartening”, said Dr Gemma Derrick, a senior lecturer at the Centre for Higher Education Research and Evaluation at Lancaster University who is not involved with the new ranking system. “I would have thought in a short period of time we would see much more of an increase.”
The new indicator of gender differences in publication output is produced by the team behind the Leiden Ranking of universities, released annually since 2011 by Leiden University’s Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS). It is the first time the centre has ranked institutions based on gender diversity.
The numbers vary across different UK institutions. The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine leads the way with more than 46% of its research papers produced between 2014 and 2017 having female authors. King’s College London comes second at just over 40%.
Some of the UK’s big hitters are lower on the list. The University of Oxford ranks 20th, with 30.7% of its publications having a female author between 2014 and 2017. The University of Cambridge is 30th, with its figure 28.4%. Previous research has found that women account for fewer than 30% of authorships worldwide.
To create the gender ranking, the researchers scanned 14.6m studies published between 2006 and 2017 by scientists at 963 research institutions across the world, determining gender of authors from their first names. More than a million papers in the sample were co-authored by UK-based scientists.
“The point isn’t necessarily to raise the percentage [of papers authored by women],” said Caroline Wagner, a public policy scholar at Ohio State University in Columbus, who was involved with conceptualising the gender ranking. “The point is to examine the systemic obstacles to women’s success.”
Wagner said academic journals needed to do better, putting more women on editorial boards and accounting for the fact that women’s work was under-cited across nearly every field, but especially in the natural sciences and engineering.
“It can’t be because their work is that much worse,” she said.
Ludo Waltman, the deputy director of CWTS, who created the gender metric, agreed there were biases against women in academia. He said he believed the trends seen today were a consequence of the low percentages of women who studied for PhDs in the 1980s and 1990s.
Some universities – especially medical or nursing ones – in Poland, Serbia, Brazil and Thailand have more than 50% rates of female authorship, the figures reveal. Wagner suggests this may be because these countries pay lower wages, and women are more likely to be willing to work for these rates.
One limitation of the ranking was that it did not consider author order despite the fact that the first and last named authors were generally thought to be playing lead roles, at least in the biomedical and life sciences, Derrick said.
Derrick said she suspected women were contributing in supplementary roles rather than leading or directing research. “I think that these numbers, even though they are troublesome, are actually much lower when you take into account the contribution that women make to the production of knowledge, indicated by where they are in author lists.”
