The GENDER GAP in Academic Publishing – A Visualization

This visualization allows one to view the past, present, and (estimated) future gender ratio of authors on academic publications listed on PubMed. The four buttons at the top allow subsetting of the data by journal, research discipline, the author's country of affiliation, and position in the author list (where 'overall' includes all authors).

• The lefthand plot shows the estimated author gender ratio for each subset of the data (e.g. a journal, or a scientific discipline) in a certain year. The year can be controlled via the slider. The gender ratio was estimated by fitting a curve to the data, as described in the accompanying paper.
• Clicking on a data point in the left plot will bring up a curve showing our estimate of the past, present, and future gender ratio, as well as the author gender ratio and its 95% confidence limits (shown by the error bars, which can be toggled on or off).
• Hovering the mouse cursor over a data point shows the sample size in terms of the number of men and women authors, and the number of papers.

Associated publication

This visualization accompanies an article published in PLoS Biology.

Holman L, Stuart-Fox D, Hauser CE (2018) The gender gap in science: How long until women are equally represented? PLOS Biology 16(4): e2004956. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.2004956.

Contacts

The gender data were collected by Luke Holman from the School of BioSciences at the University of Melbourne. This data visualisation was made by Errol Lloyd.