Although women continue to be underrepresented in the physical sciences, the rate at which they leave the field is on par with that of men. That’s according to an August 2024 study in the journal Higher Education that examined the publication patterns of researchers in 16 broad disciplines within science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine.
Using data from Scopus—a global database of publications and citations—Marek Kwiek and Lukasz Szymula of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, tracked the publishing careers of researchers in the 38 countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. They focused on more than 140 000 scientists who began putting out papers in the year 2000 and more than 230 000 who started doing so in 2010; both groups were tracked until 2022. A cessation in publishing before 2019 was used as the indicator that a scientist had left research.
Kwiek and Szymula found that about one-third of scientists who started in 2000 had left after five years, half had left after 10 years, and two-thirds had left by 2022. The differences in attrition rates between men and women varied by discipline. In biology, women, who made up nearly 48% of the year-2000 cohort, left at significantly higher rates than men throughout the study period. In contrast, in physics and astronomy, the attrition rates were similar for men and women. Of the 1524 women, 28.1% had left after five years and 66.9% had left by 2022; for the 8235 men, those numbers were 29.2% and 66.5%, respectively. That trend also bore out in fields such as computer science and mathematics.
The authors note the limitations of a bibliometric analysis; for example, some of the researchers who were classified as leaving the field may have taken a science-related job that didn’t involve publishing research. And recent studies with different methodologies have suggested that in academia, women leave at higher rates than men at every stage of their careers.
For a breakdown of attrition rates and related data presented by Kwiek and Szymula, see https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-024-01284-0.
