Gender Bias in Academic Authorship: A 24-Year Analysis of Physics Literature

Abstract

Women tend to comprise a waning proportion of prestigious positions in physics academia, a phenomenon known as leaky pipeline. In this paper, a possible contribution to leaky pipeline is examined through physics publications from 1998 to 2022.The proportion of female physicists employed at a research institution (provided by the American Institute of Physics) was compared to the sample proportion of female authors in six prominent physics journals. 100 articles were randomly selected in six sample cohorts in four-year intervals from which authors’ genders were inferred. In each sample cohort, a significantly fewer proportion of female authors than employed female physicists was observed. The discrepancy between these values tended to increase over time. In addition, the proportions of female first authors and female authors in low- and high- cited quartiles of sampled literature were established. Using statistical significance testing, no difference was found for the proportions of sampled female first authors when compared to overall sampled female authors. In citation quartiles, no definitive trend in the over- or underrepresentation of female authors in highly-cited or less frequently cited literature was established. However, women were significantly overrepresented in the top citation quartile in 2010, and conversely, overrepresented in the bottom citation quartile in 2014. These findings strongly suggest that the representation of women in prestigious physics journals is much less than expected if gender played no role in publication frequency. Therefore, leaky pipeline is hypothesized to contribute to, and be impacted by, the underrepresentation of women in physics publications.