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RESEARCH ARTICLE

A gender equality paradox in academic publishing:
Countries with a higher proportion of female
first-authored journal articles have larger
first-author gender disparities between fields

a n o p e n a c c e s s

j o u r n a l

Mike Thelwall

and Amalia Mas-Bleda

Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group, University of Wolverhampton, Wulfruna Street, Wolverhampton WV1 1LY, UK

Citation: Thelwall, M., & Mas-Bleda, UN.
(2020). A gender equality paradox in
academic publishing: Countries with a
higher proportion of female first-
authored journal articles have larger
first-author gender disparities between
fields. Quantitative Science Studies,
1(3), 1260–1282. https://doi.org/10.1162/
qss_a_00050

DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00050

Received: 02 ottobre 2019
Accepted: 22 April 2020

Corresponding Author:
Mike Thelwall
m.thelwall@wlv.ac.uk

Handling Editor:
Ludo Waltman

Copyright: © 2020 Mike Thelwall and
Amalia Mas-Bleda. Published under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
Internazionale (CC BY 4.0) licenza.

The MIT Press

Keywords: academic publishing, genere, field differences, international differences

ABSTRACT

Current attempts to address the shortfall of female researchers in science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics (STEM) have not yet succeeded, despite other academic
subjects having female majorities. This article investigates the extent to which gender disparities
are subject-wide or nation-specific by a first-author gender comparison of 30 million articles
from all 27 Scopus broad fields within the 31 countries with the most Scopus-indexed articles
2014–2018. The results show overall and geocultural patterns as well as individual national
differences. Almost half of the subjects were always more male (seven; per esempio., Mathematics) O
always more female (six; per esempio., Immunology & Microbiology) than the national average. A strong
overall trend (Spearman correlation 0.546) is for countries with a higher proportion of female
first-authored research to also have larger differences in gender disparities between fields
(correlation 0.314 for gender ratios). This confirms the international gender equality paradox
previously found for degree subject choices: Increased gender equality overall associates with
moderately greater gender differentiation between subjects. This is consistent with previous
United States-based claims that gender differences in academic careers are partly due to
(socially constrained) gender differences in personal preferences. Radical solutions may
therefore be needed for some STEM subjects to overcome gender disparities.

INTRODUCTION

The proportion of female researchers varies between fields. In Europe, Per esempio, women
are more likely to be found in medical and social sciences, whereas men are more likely to be
in engineering, technology and the natural sciences (European Commission, 2019; Leta &
Lewison, 2003). There is also evidence of differences between countries in the proportions of
women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and other areas from many
different sources, at different educational levels and for careers (European Commission, 2019;
Larivière, Ni, et al., 2013; Mastekaasa & Smeby, 2008; Riegle-Crumb, King, et al., 2012; Sadler,
Sonnert, et al., 2012; Tellhed, Bäckström, & Björklund, 2017; Vincent-Lancrin, 2008), despite a
lack of biological sex differences in capability (per esempio., Hyde & Mertz, 2009). An international com-
parison of the proportions of women in science and engineering careers in Europe found substan-
tial differences, with female majorities in Lithuania, Bulgaria, Latvia, and Portugal, in comparison to
only 25% in Hungary (Eurostat, 2019), suggesting that STEM gender effects vary substantially
between countries, even within the relatively economically homogeneous continent of Europe.

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A gender equality paradox in academic publishing

An international comparison of academic authorship has also found substantial differences
between countries in the proportion of female first-authored research, including within disciplines
(Elsevier, 2017). The proportion of female first authors may not be the same as the proportion of
active female researchers, however measured (per esempio., full-time equivalent, with teaching allowance,
including support staff ). The shortage of female researchers in STEM subjects is a cause for national
concern in many countries, leading to initiatives such as GENDER-NET in Europe (Puy Rodríguez
& Pascual Pérez, 2015), ADVANCE in the United States, and Athena SWAN in the United
Kingdom (Rosser, Barnard, et al., 2019) to redress the imbalance. Outside academia, there are also
high-profile national (per esempio., Latimer, Cerise, et al., 2019) and international (UNESCO, 2019) initia-
tives to encourage women to choose scientific careers. All these need to understand the funda-
mental causes of gender disparities to succeed.

A century ago it was widely believed that women were incapable of benefitting from an
academic education and they were barred or strongly discouraged from attending universities.
Today, there are many possible explanations for the continuing minority of women studying
science or working as scientists (Blickenstaff, 2005; Glass, Sassler, et al., 2013; Hill, Corbett, &
Rose, 2010) or working in male-dominated occupations (Frome, Alfeld, et al., 2006), with no
single reason accepted as the primary cause. Because sexism pervades society, it would be reason-
able to believe that continuing gender disparities in STEM subjects in academia are primarily due to
gender-science stereotypes (Mugnaio, Eagly, & Linn, 2015; Smyth & Nosek, 2015), conscious or sub-
conscious sexism (per esempio., Moss-Racusin, Dovidio, et al., 2012; Robnett, 2016; Rubini & Menegatti,
2014; Savigny, 2014), or implicit gender discrimination, such as not considering carer respon-
sibilities (Phillips, Tannan, & Kalliainen, 2016; Roos & Gatta, 2009). In contrasto, some argue that
discrimination cannot explain current STEM disparities in academia and propose that the main
current causes of current disparities are gender differences in personal choice (whether socially
constrained or not) due to childhood influences (Ceci, Ginther, et al., 2014; Ceci & Williams,
2011; Williams & Ceci, 2015). Per esempio, girls and women in the United States seem to be
socialized to have communal career goals and might therefore prefer directly helpful academic
subjects, whereas boys and men are more likely to have agentic self-advancement career goals
and might prefer subjects offering more status (Diekman, Steinberg, et al., 2017).

From an international perspective, there is a gender equality paradox in education that mili-
tates against the hypothesis that ongoing sexism is the primary cause of current STEM gender dis-
parities: More gender-equal countries have larger gender disparities between degree subject
choices (Stoet & Geary, 2018), as also found for international massive open online course
(MOOC) enrollments (Jiang, Schenke, et al., 2018). This evidence supports (socially constrained)
choice rather than discrimination as the most direct determinant of STEM gender disparities.
While choices are constrained by social, cultural, and economic factors, greater gender special-
ization in conditions of more free choice could occur, Per esempio, for economic or other factors
increasing overall gender equality but creating or exacerbating some aspects of gender difference
(per esempio., through more powerful gendered marketing). In support of this, women in STEM subjects in
the United States seem to pay a feminine personality trait penalty for participation (Simone,
Wagner, & Killion, 2017). It is not known whether the gender equality paradox applies after
degree-level studies, Tuttavia.

This article uses an international comparison of research specialisms to investigate the gender
equality paradox for research: whether countries with smaller overall gender disparities in
academia have larger gender disparities between subjects. Small-scale evidence has already been
reported by comparing pairs of countries. Per esempio, despite the higher proportion of female
researchers overall in the United States (Thelwall, Bailey, et al., 2019B), gender differences
between subjects are smaller in India (Thelwall, Bailey, et al., 2019UN). It is not possible to make

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A gender equality paradox in academic publishing

a cause-and-effect analysis of gender inequalities and gender disparity differences between coun-
tries because of the multiple factors that affect both, but an international comparison can point to
overall trends (Stoet & Geary, 2018). The following research questions drive the study, culminating
with the gender equality paradox (RQ3). This article focuses on the main authors of published
research for the pragmatic reasons that this is an important aspect of academia and there is rela-
tively internationally comparable evidence about research publishing from scholarly databases.
There is no reliable source of internationally comparable information about the number, fields,
and genders of researchers in the major research publishing nations.

(cid:129) RQ1: Do countries with similar cultures tend to have similar gender proportions of main

journal article authors in all academic fields?

(cid:129) RQ2: Are there broad fields with a universally high or low proportion of female main

journal article authors across all major research publishing nations?

(cid:129) RQ3: Do countries with a higher overall female participation (in terms of main journal
article authors) rate also have greater female participation (main journal article authors)
rate differences between fields?

2. METHODS

The research design was to collect a large sample of journal articles from a large set of countries,
for high statistical power, and to analyze first-author gender disparity differences between
countries and fields.

2.1. Data: Journal Articles and Countries

Scopus was chosen as the data source because it has wider coverage of non-English documents
than the Web of Science (Mongeon & Paul-Hus, 2016), which is helpful for international studies.
Dimensions may have wider coverage than Scopus (Thelwall, 2018) but lacks the transparent
field categories needed for the analysis. The sample was obtained from the 31 countries with
the most documents in Scopus. Countries with high coverage in Scopus were chosen so that there
would be enough papers to extract reasonably fine-grained gender information, even for small
fields in Scopus. The top 31 were chosen because the 32nd country, Malaysia, is problematic for
extracting author gender information from. Malaysia contains three main ethnic groups: Malay,
Chinese, and Indian (Ibrahim, 2004). Malay names are usually given in reverse order (sometimes
known as Eastern order: Yamashita & Eades, 2003), including for academic publications, with the
first name being the father’s given name. Così, all Malay first names are male and gender can be
inferred from second names. Some authors reverse this name order for some or all their academic
publications, perhaps to reflect Western conventions, complicating gender detection. Chinese
names have the different problem that the Latinized version of male and female names can be
the same, including for common names such as Wei. Così, a substantial fraction of Chinese
authors in Malaysia would have unknown genders. Any attempt to detect author genders from
names in Malaysia would therefore have to detect gender differently for each ethnic group and
correct for ethnic group biases. This would increase error rates and reduce the effective sample
size. Così, Malaysia was a logical stopping point for the country list. The issue with Latinized
Chinese names also reduced the proportion of author genders detected for China and Taiwan,
but left enough data for analysis.

The raw data consisted of all Scopus records for documents of type journal article (excluding
nonarticles and reviews) published between 2014 E 2018. A 5-year period was chosen to

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A gender equality paradox in academic publishing

give a large enough volume of data to give reasonably accurate gender estimates. Reviews were
excluded to focus on primary research. Articles were included if the first author had an affiliation
from the country examined. First authors are likely to be the main contributors to research, even in
fields where alphabetization is common (Larivière, Desrochers, et al., 2016), such as economics,
business, finance, and mathematics (Frandsen & Nicolaisen, 2010; Kadel & Walter, 2015; Levitt
& Thelwall, 2013; Waltman, 2012). This is because alphabetization is far from ubiquitous in these
fields, at least in terms of Scopus category definitions, and solo authors are automatically the main
authors. In cases where the main author is not the first author due to alphabetical order, the first
author may have the same gender as the main author, avoiding errors in the methods used here.
The impact of partial alphabetical ordering in mathematics and economics is reduced by the
prevalence of single-author papers and a tendency to gender homophily in collaboration (per esempio.,
Zhang, Bu, et al., 2018). The small minority of cases where the first author gender is different from
the main author gender (generating an error) will cancel out to some extent (male-to-female can-
celling with female-to-male in the overall results), so this is not a substantial problem in practice.
An analysis of this issue for U.S. first-authored articles from 2017 found that the worst affected
Scopus category was Accounting, with a gender shift of only 1.1% (Thelwall et al., 2019B). There
also are other factors that may influence the first-author position in authorship irrespective of
contributions, such as age, professional rank (Costas & Bordons, 2011), and gender (West,
Jacquet, et al., 2013), but these effects seem likely to be small overall for academia.

Ignoring the contributions of subsequent authors is a simplifying step, because all authors
usually make some contribution to each paper (cf. Macfarlane, 2017). The amount of this con-
tribution varies by field and probably country, so focusing on the first authors at least gives
transparent evidence.

2.2. Gender Detection and Correction

In many cultures, a person’s gender can often be accurately detected from the first name. IL
gender associations of first names vary internationally, with Kim, Andrea, and Nicola being
male in some countries and female in others. The gender of each author was therefore detect-
ed from their first name separately for each country. For each nation, a list was made of the first
names of all first authors of all articles in the data set. These lists were submitted to Gender API
(Gender-API.com) in August 2019. It returned an estimate of the percentage of men and
women using the name in the specified country, together with the number of web records used
as evidence. First names were regarded as gendered for a country if Gender API predicted that
almeno 90% of nationals with that name had the same gender and the evidence was based on
almeno 10 web profiles. Other first names were categorized as ungendered. The threshold of
90% was used to ensure that first name gender assignments were almost always correct. Questo
was important for fields with a high gender imbalance because gender assignment errors
would most affect the results for these. To give a simplifying example, if the average name
gender accuracy was 70% then a field with 10 out of 100 researchers being female would
appear to be 34% female (70% del 10 women correctly identified as female plus 30% Di
IL 90 men incorrectly identified as female = 7 + 27 out of 100).

The male and female first name lists for each country were used to split the journal article
records into separate sets for males and females, with the remainder being discarded. Questo
enabled an estimate of the number of men and women first-authored articles. In each country,
gender estimates were biased in favor of the gender that was easier to identify from first names.
To correct for this, the total number of authors from each gender in each country was estimated
by multiplying the Gender API percentage for men and women by the number of articles with a

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A gender equality paradox in academic publishing

first author of that name from the country (irrespective of whether the name met the minimum 10
records and 90% monogender thresholds). This produced an estimate of the total number of
male and female first-authored articles, except for articles with a first name with no Gender
API records. To give a simplified example, if Iran had only 30 articles, 10 by Sava (90% female,
according to Gender API), 10 by Rafat (50% female, according to Gender API) E 10 by Sayed
(100% male, according to Gender API), then the estimated number of female first-authored articles
would be 10 × 90% + 10 × 50% + 10 × 0%=14 out of 30 (47%). As all Rafats would be discarded,
the algorithm used in this paper would find 10 women (all Savas) E 10 men (all Sayeds), incor-
rectly making Iran 50% female.

This figure for women was divided by the number of female first-authored articles identified
from the gendered name list to give a correction factor (Tavolo 1). The same calculation was
performed for men. The correction factor was used to multiply all male and female author
conta. In the above Iran example, the female correction factor would be 14/10 and the male
correction factor would be 16/10, giving a correct overall estimate of 47% female. The final
data set contained 30,537,178 journal articles (using multiple counting for articles in multiple
fields) that had been assigned a first-author gender for one of the 31 countries.

To explain the correction factor again in mathematical notation, for a given country, consider
the set Names of all names known by GenderAPI for that country and let aname be the number of
articles from that country with a first author called name 2 Names. Let fname be the probability
that a person from the country called name is female, based on the overall Gender API statistics
for the country (including all names, not just those having a probability above 90%), with the
corresponding male probability being mname = 1 − fname. Then the estimated number of articles
with a female first author called name is given by fname × aname. The overall Gender API estimated
number of female authors is therefore

F ¼

name2Names

fname (cid:2) aname:

(1)

Given an equivalent Gender API estimate of the number of men M, the estimated proportion of
female would be

F
F þ M

(2)

This is different from the corresponding calculations if only names that are at least 90% female in
Gender API are considered:

F90 ¼

fname (cid:2) aname:

name 2 Names
fname≥0:9

The gender ratio based on the 90% data might be different:

F90
F90 þ M90

(3)

(4)

The gender correction factor is Eq. (1) divided by Eq. (3) for women and the equivalent for men.

The correction factors were close to 1 and similar for both genders except in three cases. For
China and Taiwan, the correction factors were high due to many common gendered Chinese
names becoming gender-ambiguous when written in the Latin character set. For South Korea,
many popular majority male names (per esempio., Hong, Hyun, Jeong, Jin, Jung, Kyoung, Kyung, Min,
Soo, Sun, Yoon, Young, Yun) were used by a substantial minority of women, reducing the

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A gender equality paradox in academic publishing

Tavolo 1.

First name statistics from Gender API and correction factors for the journal articles 2014–2018 with first authors from 31 countries

Country

Australia

Austria

Belgium

Brasile

Canada

China

Czech Rep

Denmark

Finland

France

Germany

Greece

India

Iran

Israel

Italy

Japan

Mexico

Netherlands

Norway

Poland

Portugal

Russian F

South Korea

Spain

Sweden

Svizzera

Taiwan

Turkey

First names

Assigned articles

Estimated articles

Correction

Male

Other

Female

Male

Female

Male

Female

Male

4,524

18,042

324,520

515,599

448,885

680,116

1.383

1.319

1,652

2,585

3,096

4,958

62,537

144,973

73,071

159,878

1.168

1.103

101,826

187,180

123,024

211,219

1.208

1.128

3,922

14,735

424,348

474,459

462,940

525,564

1.091

1.108

6,068

23,591

393,451

719,423

546,885

944,800

1.390

1.313

2,939

47,581

209,982

1,048,764

3,144,568

5,358,561

14.975

5.109

913

1,825

1,638

1,794

4,191

3,588

66,633

148,876

72,950

153,235

1.095

1.029

91,059

151,134

108,899

176,310

1.196

1.167

103,391

134,426

115,054

156,853

1.113

1.167

4,938

13,920

446,051

798,284

509,350

876,230

1.142

1.098

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6,301

17,483

523,475

1,418,800

627,346

1,548,686

1.198

1.092

790

2,256

59,704

139,571

70,176

149,415

1.175

1.071

3,850

10,272

30,013

304,322

828,044

445,094

1,014,088

1.463

1.225

1,117

1,733

3,033

5,222

4,402

5,872

162,633

424,041

190,914

455,819

1.174

1.075

88,585

173,501

118,508

215,142

1.338

1.240

479,968

808,359

495,141

833,324

1.032

1.031

5,336

27,389

301,626

2,253,318

541,595

2,661,946

1.796

1.181

1,310

3,764

1,697

839

951

3,520

9,961

4,026

2,584

1,813

2,804

81,204

148,349

91,578

161,460

1.128

1.088

203,428

331,964

256,626

387,651

1.262

1.168

70,696

121,911

87,305

144,891

1.235

1.188

254,293

317,767

258,575

328,480

1.017

1.034

106,542

101,251

111,378

110,304

1.045

1.089

88,631

165,183

95,164

176,236

1.074

1.067

3,509

20,653

41,610

564,683

295,704

1,052,505

7.107

1.864

2,890

3,171

3,306

1,410

2,725

5,677

7,548

6,690

5,574

5,669

419,858

644,061

437,277

670,266

1.041

170,488

265,447

205,799

310,087

1.207

1.168

104,809

264,819

133,545

302,381

1.274

1.142

21,458

66,265

277,621

448,738

12.938

6.772

207,367

399,106

247,491

431,082

1.193

1.080

1,061

1,113

Female

3,297

1,116

1,902

4,546

3,841

1,127

702

1,225

990

3,624

3,504

686

842

1,016

2,031

2,153

1,324

2,967

1,121

555

627

1,064

2,508

2,011

2,108

562

1,472

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United Kingdom

4,767

7,708

28,083

666,754

1,343,693

832,507

1,553,419

1.249

1.156

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A gender equality paradox in academic publishing

Tavolo 1.

(continued )

First names

Assigned articles

Estimated articles

Correction

Country

stati Uniti

Female

10,031

Male

Other

Female

Male

Female

Male

Female

Male

12,609

92,511

2,924,263

5,928,415

4,062,644

7,541,961

1.389

1.272

Total

68,630

106,588

425,246

9,505,512

21,031,666

15,487,615

29,740,646

proportion of men that could be reliably assigned a gender. The correction factors ensure that
the gender estimates for each country are not affected by these issues.

2.3. Analyses

The main results are the corrected proportions of male and female first-authored articles 2014–
18 in each country overall and in each broad Scopus field. Scopus fields are used as a con-
venient classification system for all articles. They are journal-based and imperfect for multidis-
ciplinary journals but provide transparent results. Articles in multiple broad fields are counted
at full value in each one. Because there is too much data to display together (27 fields ×
31 countries = 837 female proportions), country results are grouped together by cultural sim-
ilarity (the mainly shared language and partly shared historical roots of Australia, Canada,
United Kingdom, and United States; the geographical closeness and Dutch/French/German
linguistic overlaps in a European set), or geographic closeness (per esempio., Eastern Europe, East Asia),
to show individual values.

There are two key variables for each country: the proportion of women in each broad field
and the proportion of women overall. As these are related, to compare field differences be-
tween countries, the overall female proportion was subtracted from each field female propor-
tion to give the proportion of women in the country relative to the country average (come mostrato
in Figure 10). Così, Per esempio, a negative value for a field indicates that there were fewer
female first-authored articles in that field than the country average.

The median absolute value of the above differences between field-specific and overall field
proportions was used as an indicator of the extent to which female proportions varied between
fields within a country. The median was used rather than the mean (or standard deviation for the
original proportions) because some fields have relatively small numbers of articles, potentially
generating outliers. The country mean absolute differences were correlated with the country
overall female proportions to assess whether there was a relationship between gender parity
(as reflected in the overall proportion of females) and field gender differentiation (as reflected
by the extent to which the female proportion for fields differs from the country average).

3. RESULTS

Offline versions of the graphs are available in the supplementary material (https://doi.org/
10.6084/m9.figshare.9891575) to view exact values and the calculations.

3.1. RQ1: Regional Comparisons

The results are discussed separately by region or set of countries with some similarities before
an overall discussion. The groupings used in the current paper are not empirically justifiable,
but serve to illustrate potentially similar countries, in terms of shared languages and historical
roots or geographic proximity.

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The four large, mainly English-speaking, countries all have wide differences between sub-
jects in the proportions of female first authors, from male-dominated Physics & Astronomy and
Mathematics to female dominated Nursing and Veterinary Science (Figura 1). Nevertheless,
the proportions of female first authors in each of the 27 subjects is similar between countries.
This logically suggests that the main reason for the gender disparity differences between sub-
jects is broad cultural and/or biological sex differences in preferences (but see below) Piuttosto
than national culture or politics. Per esempio, the reason for the small minority of female first
authors in Mathematics could be due to anglophone cultural commonalties.

China, Japan, and South Korea differ substantially in the proportions of female first authors
in all subjects (Figura 2). These East Asian countries speak different languages, (mostly) write
with different scripts, and have completely different histories and cultures. China has the high-
est proportion of female first authors in almost all subjects and Japan has the lowest proportion
of female first authors in all subjects. In several subjects, the female proportion for China is
more than double that of Japan. There is a trend for subjects with a higher proportion of female
first authors in one country to also have a higher proportion in the other two, but the trend is
much weaker than for the English-speaking countries. Taken on its own, Figura 2 suggests that
national or cultural factors are important to explain the proportions of female first authors.
Contrasting Figure 2 with Figure 1 suggests that cultural factors are powerful influences on
female first author proportion differences between subjects and shows that biological sex

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Figura 1. Percentages of female first-authored journal articles 2014–2018 by Scopus broad category for mainly English-speaking countries.
First author gender was detected using names identified as at least 90% monogender via Gender API and overall gender proportions were
corrected for differing abilities to detect male and female names in each country.

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Figura 2. Percentages of female first-authored journal articles 2014–2018 by Scopus broad category for East Asian countries. Calculations as
in Figure 1. Taiwan is not shown because some of the subjects had too few (21) gendered articles.

differences are not simple determinants of the results. China and South Korea had high gender
correction factors for at least one gender (Vedi la tabella 1 and associated discussion), but because
these factors correct for gender as found on the web, it is possible that the overall proportion of
women is not accurate for both countries.

The six mainly Dutch, French, or German-speaking Western European countries (Figura 3)
display less female proportion similarity than the English-speaking countries (Figura 1) but more
than the East Asian countries (Figura 2). The proportions of female first authors are similar in all
six countries in Material Science, Mathematics, Physics & Astronomy, Environmental Science,
Arts & Humanities, and Social Sciences. They are quite different in Health Professions,
Medicine, Nursing, and Veterinary Science. It is possible that the gender proportions in some
professional subjects are affected by the nature of the publications indexed by Scopus in the
latter cases. Per esempio, some practice-focused nursing journal articles are nation specific
because they deal with national health initiatives. These may be published in local nursing
journals that may not be indexed by Scopus. If a different proportion of women publish in more
nationally focused professional journals, then the international differences in professional
subjects could be explained by differing Scopus coverage of the national health literature. It might
also reflect differing extents to which a national professional health literature has developed.

India, Israel, Iran, and Turkey (Figura 4) are culturally different countries, speaking different
languages, writing with different scripts, and having different histories. They have similar female
proportions in Agricultural & Biological Sciences, Arts & Humanities, and Dentistry only. In many
other subjects, India has a substantially lower proportion of female first authors than at least one

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Figura 3. Percentages of female first-authored journal articles 2014–2018 by Scopus broad category for Dutch/French/German speaking
countries. Calculations as in Figure 1.

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Figura 4. Percentages of female first-authored journal articles 2014–2018 by Scopus broad category for India, Iran, Israel, and Turkey.
Calculations as in Figure 1.

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of the other countries. India has by far the lowest variation in female proportions between sub-
jects, Tuttavia. Israel has an appreciably higher proportion of female first authors in Veterinary
and Health Professions, Turkey in Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, and both countries in
Psychology.

Two of the four north Mediterranean countries, Italy and Spain, have similar proportions of
female first authors in most subjects, but Portugal has the highest female proportion in most
and Greece often has the lowest. Greece also has relatively low proportions of women in
Multidisciplinary and in Economics, Econometrics & Finance (Figura 5).

Of the two Latin American countries, Brasile (Portuguese) has the highest proportion of
women in almost all subjects, with the difference tending to be largest in the subjects with
the most women (Figura 6). The rank order of subjects in terms of female proportions is quite
similar to that for Mexico (Spanish).

The three Eastern European countries speak different languages and write with different al-
phabets (similar for Poland and the Czech Republic) but were east of the Iron Curtain, con
Poland and the Czech Republic sharing a border. The Czech Republic also shares a border
with Germany and Austria, and Poland has a border with Germany. The three countries have
some general commonalities in gender proportions, but there are no fields with similar pro-
portions of female researchers and several fields, including Decision Sciences, dove il

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Figura 5. Percentages of female first-authored journal articles 2014–2018 by Scopus broad category for South Europe. Calculations as in
Figura 1.

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Figura 6. Percentages of female first-authored journal articles 2014–2018 by Scopus broad category for Latin American countries.
Calculations as in Figure 1.

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Figura 7. Percentages of female first-authored journal articles 2014–2018 by Scopus broad category for Eastern Europe. Calculations as in
Figura 1.

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gender proportions are quite different (Figura 7). Poland has a substantially higher proportion
of female first authors in several subjects (perhaps reflecting better social conditions for
women; Webster, 2001).

The four Nordic countries (Figura 8) are almost as similar as the English-speaking countries,
suggesting the importance of culture. Although the four countries speak different languages,
citizens can sometimes communicate (Doetjes, 2007), and researchers seem to engage often
in collaboration (Persson, Melin, et al., 1997) and joint events (per esempio., 23rd Nordic Workshop on
Bibliometrics and Research Policy). Despite high proportions of women overall, there are low
proportions in Mathematics.

As Figures 1–8 illustrate, the rank order of fields in terms of the proportion of women has
varying degrees of similarity between countries. The tendency for some countries to have very
similar rank orders can be illustrated by the correlations between them (Figura 9). Overall,
Russia (for journal indexing reasons mentioned in the Discussion) and Taiwan (due to low
numbers of gender-classified articles) are anomalies, but otherwise the rank correlations are
very high. There is not a definitive scale for correlation strength judgements because the nu-
merical value is influenced by the extent to which there is uncontrolled variation in the data
source. As an approximate guideline, in psychology, a correlation of 0.5 has been described as
a “large” effect size (Cohen, 2013). The average rank correlation between each country and
the others is between 0.69 (South Korea) E 0.87 (The Netherlands) except for Russia (0.60)
and Taiwan (0.66).

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Figura 8. Percentages of female first-authored journal articles 2014–2018 by Scopus broad category for Nordic countries. Calculations as in
Figura 1.

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correlations for all pairs of countries are in the online supplement (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.9891575).

Spearman rank correlations between all pairs of countries for field gender proportions, shaded by correlation strength. Exact

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Figura 10. Percentages of female first-authored journal articles 2014–2018 above the national average by Scopus broad category for 31 countries.
Calculations as in Figure 1.

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3.2. RQ2: Overall Comparisons

Subtracting the national average female proportion from the female proportion for each individ-
ual subject reveals a strong pattern for some subjects to be more male or female than average in
most countries (Figura 10). The proportion of female first-authored research is above the national
average for all 31 countries in six areas: Nursing; Psychology; Immunology & Microbiology;
Pharmacology, Toxicology & Pharmaceutics; Neuroscience; and Biochemistry, Genetics &
Molecular Biology. The proportion of male first-authored research is above the national average
for all 31 countries in seven areas: Mathematics; Physics & Astronomy; Engineering; Computer
Scienza; Energy; Materials Science; and Earth & Planetary Sciences. The remaining 14 Scopus
broad subjects vary between countries. Within these, some country/field combinations are
clearly outliers in terms of having opposite gender disparity difference to the international norm.

(cid:129) Veterinary Science: While this is one of the most female subjects overall and female
dominated in countries such as Finland (88%), it is more male oriented than the national
average in India, Iran, Mexico, and Turkey.

(cid:129) Medicine: This is more male oriented than the national average only in South Korea.
(cid:129) Dentistry: This is a small category, which may account for international variations.
(cid:129) Health Professions: Although more female oriented than the national average in most
countries, it is substantially less in Spain (10% less female) and Portugal (9% less female).
(cid:129) Decision Sciences: This is a strongly male subject overall but more female than the
national average in the Russian Federation (14% more female) and South Korea (5% more
female).

(cid:129) Economics, Econometrics & Finance: This is strongly male overall but more female than
the national average in Taiwan (16% more female), the Russian Federation (13% more
female), and South Korea (5% more female).

3.3. RQ3: Overall Gender Proportions and Between-Field Gender Proportion Variations

The overall proportion of female first authors correlates positively and strongly (Spearman rho:
0.546) with the median absolute gender deviation between fields (Figura 11). Japan has a rel-
atively high variation between fields for its female proportion. Portugal is the opposite, con un
relatively low female first author proportion deviation between fields for its overall female first
author proportion. Even including Japan and Portugal, there is a clear pattern for increasing
overall female participation to associate with increasing gender differentiation between sub-
jects. If the relatively extreme cases of Japan, Australia, and The Netherlands are excluded, IL
correlation is lower but still strong: 0.437.

The above results show that countries with higher proportions of women have larger var-
iations between fields in the proportions of women. This does not necessarily imply an in-
creased underlying tendency for women to choose more female fields in countries with
more women overall. This depends on the way in which career decisions are made. For ex-
ample, suppose that women first choose to become an academic and then choose a specialty,
with the two decisions being independent. If the probabilities for the second decision did not
change, the median absolute gender deviation between fields would increase as the female
proportion overall increased. To illustrate, if 90% of women becoming academics choose
nursing and 10% choose mathematics, then when there are few women the overall propor-
tions might be 1% women in mathematics and 9% women in nursing, but with more women
in academia the proportions might increase to 10% women in mathematics and 90% women
in nursing. Here the ratios are the same at 9:1 in favor of nursing, but the difference has

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Figura 11. Corrected female proportion and median absolute deviation between the broad field female proportions and the overall national
female proportion (Spearman = 0.546).

increased from 8% A 80%. To test for this, correlations were calculated for the ratios of women
between fields.

For each country, the overall female to male ratio was calculated and, for each field, divided
by the field female to male ratio (vice versa for fields with an above average female to male
ratio). The field median of these was correlated against the overall female proportion for the
31 countries, giving a moderate Spearman correlation of 0.314 (Figura 12). If Australia, IL
Netherlands, and Japan are removed then the correlation falls to 0.273. Così, part, but not all
of the tendency for increasing overall female participation to associate with increasing gender

Figura 12. Corrected female ratio spread (taking into account the overall female proportion) between the broad field female proportions and
the overall national female proportion (Spearman = 0.314).

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differentiation between subjects could be a mathematical side effect of increasing overall pro-
portions of women if career decisions are made in the two-stage way described above.

4. DISCUSSION

The results have several limitations. The Scopus data source may influence the gender propor-
tions for non-English-speaking countries, particularly in the arts, humanities, and social sci-
enze, and may also affect countries with substantial non-English scientific publishing,
including China, Japan, and the Russian Federation. The restriction to first authors is another
important limitation because there may be international differences in the extent to which
women are first authors and the analysis ignores contributions of other authors. More insidi-
ously, there may be international differences in the extent to which female authors are able to
list themselves as first authors. Gender differences vary between authorship positions, so the
results should not be assumed to apply equally to last authors (who may tend to be more senior
and more likely to be male) or to all authors (West et al., 2013). There may also be interna-
tional differences in the extent to which women in research jobs publish rather than, for ex-
ample, teach, manage, or support other researchers. The results also ignore any gender
differences in the quality or impact of academic outputs, with current evidence suggesting that
female first-authored research tends to be slightly more highly cited (Thelwall, in press).

The Scopus classification system for journals is a limitation because there are other ways of
classifying academic publications, and publication-level classification would be more accu-
rate than the journal-level classification used by Scopus (Klavans & Boyack, 2017). The restric-
tion to nations that publish extensively in Scopus-indexed journals means that the findings
should not be extrapolated to less active countries, for which the gender publishing dynamics
may be different. There are also substantial gender differences between relatively similar re-
search topics or journals (per esempio., Filardo, da Graca, et al., 2016; Piper, Scheel, et al., 2016;
Sidhu, Rajashekhar, et al., 2009), which the current analysis does investigate.

RQ1: The results suggest that field gender profiles are most similar for countries with similar
cultures. Nevertheless, there are no accurate measures of the extent to which two or more coun-
tries share a common culture because of the wide variety of components that could be assessed
(Hofstede & Bond, 1984). Academics are also frequently internationally mobile and therefore
the culture of academia in any country is likely to at least partially reflect the cultures of other
nations for which mobility is possible (per esempio., with a shared or similar language, and with few or
no job market barriers), as well as shared academic cultures through international collaboration
and conferences. Only two of the groups of countries had very similar proportions of female first
authors in most subjects, although the remaining sets arguably contained relatively dissimilar
countries. The English-speaking group is the most linguistically and perhaps also culturally
homogeneous due to its similar level of economic development, partly common historical roots,
and direct exposure to the untranslated U.S. media industry. The three Western European groups
are also relatively homogeneous due to a shared European Union political context, similar eco-
nomic development, and many shared land or sea borders. In contrasto, the other groups are more
geographically dispersed, share few or no borders, and speak and write substantially different
languages, so they are culturally heterogeneous. The level of cultural heterogeneity seems to
equate to the level of similarity in female proportions between fields. Così, the results are con-
sistent with culture contributing to gender proportion differences between fields.

RQ2: The results show that almost half of the disciplines consistently across countries have
more first authors from the same gender than the national average. Although it has previously
been shown that there are commonalities between many countries in terms of subjects with low

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proportions of women (Elsevier, 2017; Eurostat, 2019), the evidence here seems to be the most
systematic so far. It has also been previously shown that there are national exceptions to inter-
national gendered subject trends, such as the female dominance of computing in Malaysia
(Othman & Latih, 2006), but the current results give more evidence of national gender excep-
tions to international trends (per esempio., Veterinary Science in Figure 10). The results also show the
absence of national exceptions for almost half of the Scopus broad categories (categories with
bars on the same side of the line for all countries in Figure 10). The five categories with the
biggest anomalies were checked for underlying causes.

(cid:129) Veterinary Science: No anomalies were found for this in the journals for the countries with
a male orientation. Veterinary Science students switched from 70% male to 80% female
from 1975 A 2018 in the United States (AAVMC, 2019; Thelwall et al., 2019B), perhaps
due to a greater focus on pets than farm animals in combination with greater perceived
physical security for women working in isolated rural areas. Così, it is possible that
Veterinary Science becomes female-friendlier or feminized (Irvine & Vermilya, 2010) COME
a side effect of greater overall gender equality and/or higher economic development.
(cid:129) Medicine: No anomalies were found for this in the journals for South Korea, the country
with male majority Medicine researchers. The proportion of women receiving doctorates
in South Korea increased from 13% in the 1980s to 30% in the 2000s, with a lower
proportion of women becoming academics (Kim & Kim, 2015) but no prior research
seems to have remarked on low proportions of women in medicine for South Korea,
compared to other countries. The cause of this difference is therefore unclear.

(cid:129) Health Professions: For Spain and Portugal, the reason for the male orientation to this
category was the inclusion of large sports-related journals, including Revista
Internacional de Medicina y Ciencias de la Actividad Fisica y del Deporte (186 articles from
Spain), RICYDE: Revista Internacional de Ciencias del Deporte (91 Spain), Retos (206
Spain), Motricidade (60 Portugal), and many international sport journals. This suggests that
universities in Spain and Portugal have a stronger focus on sport than other countries, E
sport is a relatively male health-related profession. Così, the cause of the international
differences in this category seems to be international differences in the importance of
subjects within the category rather than gender differences across the area.

(cid:129) Decision Sciences: Most Russian Decision Science articles are from the narrow category
Management Science and Operations Research. In this category 906 out of 1,137
Russian articles were from the Venezuelan multidisciplinary journal Espacios. This jour-
nal covers, “production engineering, policy and management of science and techno-
logy, innovation, technology management, education and related areas” (revistaespacios.
com), so the relatively high proportion of women in Decision Science for Russia is an
indexing anomaly and does not reflect a high proportion of women studying core
Decision Science topics. No similar explanation could be found for South Korea. IL
closest to an anomaly was the journal Information Sciences (143 South Korean articles),
which contains decision and computer science articles, but computer science is also a
male field. Così, South Korea seems to be an anomaly for gender in Decision Sciences.
(cid:129) Economics, Econometrics & Finance: The apparently high proportion of women in
Russia for Economics is due to the inclusion of the large general social science journal,
Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences (969 articles), so this is again an indexing
anomaly. The set of South Korea economics articles included 240 from the business-
focused Journal of Distribution Science, which may account for the relatively high per-
centage of female first-authored articles from South Korea. Così, the underlying subject
of Economics may well be more male than the national average in all 31 countries.

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In summary, the anomalies in the two quantitative areas can be dismissed as indexing is-
sues, the Health Professions anomalies may be due to the differing strengths of national spe-
cialisms, Veterinary Science seems to have its gender composition influenced by economic
development, and the South Korean anomaly for Medicine has an unknown cause. Overall,
this suggests that there is a robust single gender association for an additional two broad fields,
but the situation is more complex for the others.

RQ3: The strong positive statistical correlation between the proportion of women and the
extent of variation between subjects supports the gender equality paradox applying to research
publishing. The correlation reduces to moderate if calculated based on ratio differences (Piuttosto
than the magnitude of gender differences) between fields within a country, showing that there is
a weaker, but still positive, tendency for ratios of women in fields to be wider when the overall
proportion of women is higher. Previous research suggests that gender inequalities are at least
partly due to the level of sexism in society (Brandt, 2011). If decreasing gender disparities within
academia reflect greater female equality in society or academia, then it might be expected that
gender disparities between fields (or at least gender ratio disparities) would be smaller in coun-
tries with smaller overall gender disparities, but the opposite is the case; hence it seems reason-
able to apply the terminology gender equality paradox (Stoet & Geary, 2018).

Following from the RQ3 results, it cannot be concluded that increased equality or decreas-
ing overall gender disparities cause increases in gender disparity differences (or ratio differ-
enze) between fields, although it is a logical possibility. Per esempio, perhaps men in
some fields, resentful at the increasing intrusion of women into “their” former territory, Avere
increased bias against women to compensate, although it seems more likely that pre-existing
biases would decrease as the younger generation replaces the older, because sexist attitudes
seem to be decreasing over time (per esempio., belief in traditional gender roles declined from 43% A
8% in the United Kingdom 1984–2017; Taylor & Scott, 2019). Evidence from the United States
also tends to oppose gender bias as the primary cause of current disparities in academia (Ceci
et al., 2014; Williams & Ceci, 2015). Higher levels of economic development may instead
lead to greater gender equality and lead to changes in academic subjects to make them more
gender dimorphic, although this also seems unlikely except for Veterinary Science (perhaps
less farm work and safer working environments in developed nations). It is nevertheless
possible that gender bias has evolved, rather than reduced, to have different effects on women
in the workplace. These might include causing greater role differentiation through what has
been termed “benevolent” sexism (Hideg & Ferris, 2016). Nevertheless, longitudinal studies do
not suggest that “benevolent” sexism is increasing (Hammond, Milojev, et al., 2018; Huang,
Osborne, & Sibley, 2019).

An alternative explanation for the gender equality paradox found is socially constrained
personal choice. In the context of persisting STEM gender gaps in the United States, it has been
previously argued that greater economic development may lead to a greater emphasis on
personal satisfaction from jobs for all adults, because there is more economic freedom and
jobs tend to be more creative. In this context, greater freedom of choice may increase the
chance that boys and girls opt out of subjects that they excel at in favor of subjects that they
enjoy or match their (socially constrained) life goals. This is supported by evidence that girls
and women in the United States are less interested in STEM careers (Su, Rounds, & Armstrong,
2009). Empirical evidence has also been presented for gender differences in life goals partially
explaining gender differences in career choices within the United States (Diekman et al.,
2017), so this hypothesis seems plausible for research jobs. In parallel, gender-based adver-
tising in richer societies may create more gender conformity pressures that may influence both
career choices and life goals. Relentless advertising and advertising-related media pressure

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targeted at career women has been argued to be the primary cause of the greatly increased
emphasis on female beauty in the United States after women started to gain greater economic
power in the 1970s, Per esempio (Wolf, 1991), changing social expectations for women. In
contrasto, in a less developed society, parents may have more influence on career choices and
may push their offspring to jobs that match family goals (Dutta, 2017; Gupta, 2012). In less
developed societies with recent expansion in higher education, studying for a degree or PhD
might already be perceived as a gender nonconforming choice for women (breaking the
woman as homemaker stereotype), so picking a more masculine subject might seem to be
a relatively minor additional step.

The results were correlated with gender inequality data from the United Nations to set them
in a wider context using the Gender Inequality Index (GII) from 2017, which excludes Taiwan
(UNDP, 2019). The proportion of female first-authored research has a low Pearson correlation
with the GII (–0.144, n = 30; lower GII scores indicate greater equality), so the overall level of
gender inequality has little relationship with research publishing inequalities. The median ab-
solute gender deviation between fields has a moderate correlation with the GII (–0.399, n =
30), so countries that are more gender equal overall tend to have larger gender disparity dif-
ferences between fields, although the relationship is not strong. The tests were repeated for the
overall Human Development Index (HDI) 2017. Overall human development surprisingly has
almost no relationship with female first-author proportions (0.078, n = 30; higher HDI scores
indicate greater development), but a strong relationship with gender deviation between fields
(0.600, n = 30). These findings tend to support the hypothesis that (socially influenced) choice
is more important than overt sexism as a primary explanation for the low proportions of
women in STEM subjects in developed nations.

5. CONCLUSIONS

The results show that countries having a higher proportion of female first-authored articles
indexed in Scopus tend to have greater diversity between fields in the proportion of female
first-authored research. This is also true, albeit to a lesser extent, if gender ratios rather than
gender proportions are considered. This extends the gender equality paradox from degree
subject choices to academic research publishing, although there are additional variations
between subjects that may be more culturally specific. Although this article does not identify
causal evidence, a possible explanation for the paradox is that increasing gender equality in
society, formazione scolastica, or academia tends to increase the likelihood that men and women prefer
different types of subjects or have differing career goals for reasons that may be socially
influenced.

The findings are consistent with the current lack of female researchers in STEM subjects
being a consequence or correlate of increased gender differentiation within an overall more
equal academia rather than being primarily due to continued explicit or implicit discrimina-
zione. The increased differences could be due to gender differentiation pressures changing their
natura (per esempio., in advertising or culture) in more gender equal societies. This suggests that the
essential step of fully eradicating direct and indirect sexism within higher education and re-
search will be insufficient to address gender disparities in most areas of science. Per esempio,
society might then consider whether brilliant mathematical women should be given incentives
to become research mathematicians in the face of alternative career options that they might
otherwise prefer, or whether socialization processes in relatively gender-equal societies that
underly gender differences in career choices should be identified and challenged.

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AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
Mike Thelwall: Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Visualization, Writing—original
bozza, Writing—review & editing. Amalia Mas-Bleda: Writing—original draft, Writing—review &
editing.

COMPETING INTERESTS

The authors have no competing interests.

FUNDING INFORMATION

This research was not funded.

DATA AVAILABILITY

The processed data used to produce the graphs are available in the supplementary material
(https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.9891575). A subscription to Scopus is required to repli-
cate the research, except with updated citation counts, with the methods described above.

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