Women have made progress as scientific researchers, but parity is a long way off

Women have made strides as scientific researchers around the globe over the last 20 years, but the progress has not been spread equally across all fields and women’s STEM representation remains well behind men, a 20-year study released this month shows.

The report from Elsevier, an Amsterdam-based global analytics company, found that the share of women involved in research internationally climbed to 41% in 2022, up from 28% two decades earlier. The report found the biggest gains were made in the health science area.

“Taking our inspiration from Marie Curie and the legions of talented women scientists before and since, we have sought to both notice what has been done and what remains to be done,” said  Kumsal Bayazit, CEO of Elsevier, who became the first woman to lead the firm five years ago. “In putting together this report we sought to summarize the advances as well as the persistent remaining challenges experienced by women researchers. There is progress, but it has been slow.”

“At the current pace of change, equality remains too far away and further action in needed to accelerate change “Our hope is that (the report) will help stimulate dialogue, sharing of best practices and inform targeted interventions to support women researchers and innovators,” she wrote in the introduction to the study results.

The importance of gender equality in research is that it “allows society to benefit from the diverse range of perspectives, ideas and approaches that men and women bring to their work,” the report noted. “Gender-diverse teams produce more novel and higher impact scientific ideas … making it more likely that the innovative solutions they develop will be equitable, inclusive and effective.”

Women have taken the lead over men in a number of areas where sustainable development goals are involved, the study found. They are the majority of active researchers working on these UN Sustainable Development Goal research areas:

• Education
• Gender equality
• Reduction of inequalities
• Peace and justice

But in several other areas of scientific research women are still lagging, the report found:

• Fewer papers involving women are being published than involving men, a gap that has not narrowed over the 20 years of the study.
• Publications written by men are citied more often than those written by women, though that gap tends to diminish the more women advance in their careers.
• Women fall way behind men when it comes to patent applications, an indicator of innovation in research. Three-quarters of all patent applications were filed by men alone or all male teams in 2022; just 3% were filed by teams consisting only of women.

Read more: The gender wage gap in the U.S. is closing, but ever so slowly