When Will the Gender Gap in Science Disappear?
A new study estimates that it will take 16 years for women and men to publish papers in equal numbers. For physics, it will take 258.
Sixteen years.
That’s how long it will take before the number of women on scientific papers is equal to the number of men.
Luke Holman from the University of Melbourne got that estimate by working out the number of female and male authors on almost 10 million academic papers, published over the last 15 years. With help from Melbourne colleagues Cindy Hauser and Devi Stuart-Fox, he then used the data to estimate the size of the well-documented gender gap in science, and more importantly, how long it might take to close.
At the current rate of change, women will catch up to men in 16 years—but that overall estimate masks a huge amount of variation. For example, out of the 115 disciplines
