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Despite advances in gender equality over the past decades, women continue to be underrepresented. In a new study, information scientist, professor Vincent Larivière and colleagues from the University of Montreal in Quebec (UQAM) and the University of Indiana examined peer-reviewed articles. The researchers found that despite the fact that there are more female students than males, women are still underrepresented by the academic publishing system.

"Although female students outnumber males, we know that professors are overwhelmingly male and so is both the authorship and citation of research papers. For every article with a female first-author, there are nearly two articles first-authored by men," Larivière said. "This study is the first to actually quantify this disparity across disciplines and around the world. The problem persists despite a concerted effort to correct it - we cannot address an issue properly until we understand it. And the exclusion of half of the planet's brains is a very serious problem indeed."

For this review, the research team analyzed scientific papers that were published from 2008 to 2012. The papers were taken from the Web of Science database, which provided information on the authors' names and their affiliations. The researchers did not include peer-reviewed articles that were letters to the editor or book reviews. After weeding these types of articles out of the sample, the researchers scored authors based on their level of importance. The categories included senior author, first author, and so on. The researchers then used several sources, such as the US Census to help them assign the genders of authors. They were able to successfully find out the genders of 65.2 percent of the authorships they looked at.

"In North America, Western Europe and other highly productive research countries, we found that all articles with women in dominant author positions receive fewer citations than those with men in the same positions," Larivière explained. "Moreover, women had less international collaborations than men - international collaborations typically improve the likelihood of being cited."

When the researchers looked into regional differences, they found that places such as Vermont, Rhode Island, Maine, Nova Scotia and Quebec had the least gender disparities. New Mexico, Mississippi and Wyoming, however, were on the opposite end of the spectrum. The researchers could not explain why gender disparities exist, but suggested that more research needs to be done.

"Given that citations now play a central role in the evaluation of researchers, this situation can only worsen gender disparities," Larivière said. "We should look more closely at the work itself to determine if there are characteristics that contribute more to these disparities. Perhaps there are less quantitative, aspects of scholarship that reveal a different story regarding gender disparities in science. And it is possible that there is something intrinsic to certain disciplines that make them more or less appealing to scientists of a particular sex."

The study was published in Nature.