New study says the gender gap in science could take generations to fix

Without further interventions, the gender gap in the science workforce is likely to persist for generations, particularly in surgery, computer science, physics and maths.

That’s based on research by me and two colleagues, published today in PLOS Biology, which mapped the gender gap using data on 36 million authors of more than 10 million articles published in 6,000 different scientific journals over the past 15 years.

I wanted to find out how many women work in different fields of STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine), and when – if ever – women will be equally represented in the workforce.

Women in STEMM

The results are a mixture of good news and bad. I estimate that across science and medicine in the world as a whole, women make up around 40% of the workforce. In Australia, we are par for the course at around 41%. This is a substantial improvement over earlier decades, when very few scientists or doctors were women. Read more

Luke Holman - The Conversation - 20 Apr 2018