Do the social roles that women and men occupy in science allow equal access to publication?

Anyone who thinks that science is on a glide path to gender equality should read the study by Huang et al. (1) showing a publication gender gap favoring men that has increased over time as more women have entered science fields. Although the lesser publishing by women has also emerged in several other studies, this current PNAS article provides more extensive evidence by showing that the women’s publication deficit extends across science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines and nations (1). These findings may seem puzzling but less so if considered in the context of women’s positioning within science. Why is it that women are not gradually attaining status equal to that of men as contributors to scientific knowledge? Huang et al. (1) provide some guidance concerning possible causes of their perplexing findings. They show that women and men publish a similar number of articles per year of their publishing careers and have the same impact for the same number of publications. They further demonstrate that the overall sex difference in productivity is explained largely by women’s higher rates of dropping out of publishing, producing women’s shorter publishing careers. Therefore, a search for causes should focus on these shorter publishing histories. Although not testable within the limits of the bibliometric data of Huang et al. (1), likely explanations reside in the social roles that women and men occupy in science and the responsibilities that they undertake in these roles. Although this commentary addresses these considerations only in the context of available US data, they warrant investigation in all nations. Consider that entry to science takes place in the roles of graduate student and postdoctoral researcher in which beginning scientists typically achieve one or more usually coauthored publications, enabling their names first to appear in the research literature. Among students, from … [↵][1]1Email: eagly{at}northwestern.edu. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1