Men predicted to outnumber women in physics until the year 2158

An analysis of nearly 5.5 million scientific papers has found that, on current trends, the proportion of women authoring research won’t reach parity with men in some fields for over 100 years

By Jason Arunn Murugesu

The number of women authoring scientific papers is increasing, but men still dominate overall and some fields won’t reach gender equity until the next century, according to a major analysis.

Cassidy Sugimoto at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and Vincent Larivière at the University of Montreal in Canada analysed nearly 5.5 million scientific papers published between 2008 and 2020, using a machine-learning algorithm to estimate the likelihood that a person’s name belonged to a man or woman.

Names that were 10 …