ArticleRoyal Society open science2019
Unravelling the gender productivity gap in science: a meta-analytical review.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 34 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
34 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 134 citations in OpenAlex.
- Exploring Gender Bias in Six Key Domains of Academic Science: An Adversarial Collaboration.Psychological science in the public interest : a journal of the American Psychological Society · 2023Pooled it
- Structural barriers drive gender inequality across academic careers in Brazilian ecology.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Gender Differences in National Institutes of Health Funding for Family Medicine Faculty.Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine : JABFM · 2026Article
- Examining gender and ethnic disparities in scientific authorship to promote a culture of equity, diversity and inclusion at a university school of public health.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Breaking barriers: ten essential steps to achieve gender equality in academia through scientific societies.npj biodiversity · 2025Review
- Older people care increases the gender gap in academia.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Article
- Global Trends and Cross-Country Differences in Authorship by Women in Academic Anaesthesiology Since 1996: A Repeated Cross-Sectional Analysis.Journal of clinical medicine · 2025Article
- Is the audience gender-blind? Smaller attendance in female talks highlights an imbalanced visibility in academia.npj biodiversity · 2025Article
- Historical and ongoing inequities shape research visibility in Latin American aquatic mammal paleontology.Communications biology · 2025Article
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- Lookism, a Leak in the Career Pipeline? Career Perspective Consequences of Lookism Climate and Workplace Incivility.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- A re-evaluation of gender bias in receptiveness to scientific evidence of gender bias.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Comparative analysis of automatic gender detection from names: evaluating the stability and performance of ChatGPTPeerJ. Computer science · 2024Article
- Over twenty years of publications in Ecology: Over-contribution of women reveals a new dimension of gender bias.PloS one · 2024Article
- Article
- Editorial: Women in CNS drug delivery: 2022-2024.Frontiers in drug delivery · 2024Article
- Ten simple rules for a mom-friendly Academia.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the gender gap in research productivity within academia.eLife · 2023Article
- Gender differences in animal cognition science.Animal cognition · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Women underrepresentation in science has frequently been associated with women being less productive than men (i.e. the gender productivity gap), which may be explained by women having lower success rates, producing science of lower impact and/or suffering gender bias. By performing global meta-analyses, we show that there is a gender productivity gap mostly supported by a larger scientific production ascribed to men. However, women and men show similar success rates when the researchers' work is directly evaluated (i.e. publishing articles). Men's success rate is higher only in productivity proxies involving peer recognition (e.g. evaluation committees, academic positions). Men's articles showed a tendency to have higher global impact but only if studies include self-citations. We detected gender bias against women in research fields where women are underrepresented (i.e. those different from Psychology). Historical numerical unbalance, socio-psychological aspects and cultural factors may influence differences in success rate, science impact and gender bias. Thus, the maintenance of a women-unfriendly academic and non-academic environment may perpetuate the gender productivity gap. New policies to build a more egalitarian and heterogeneous scientific community and society are needed to close the gender gap in science.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.