What do Rosalind Franklin, Caroline Herschel, Jeanne Baret, Mary Anning and Maria Sybilla Merian have in common? They were all important scientists - and yet few people are familiar with them. On the other hand, Albert Einstein, Wilhelm Röntgen or Max Planck, after whom large scientific organizations, natural constants or examination devices are named, are quite different. It is often suspected, now a study in "Nature" presents new evidence: women are systematically less appreciated and seen in science than men for the same performance.
The observation preceding the study is that women are less published and patented than men. The reasons for this are often that they work in a less inviting environment, have larger family obligations, take other positions in the laboratory or experience other care. The new work now suggests that women are not necessarily less productive, but that their work is embezzled - they are less often mentioned in articles and patents, even though they were involved.
Methodological, of course, it is difficult to look for something that is not there. "The large bibliometric databases that are used to investigate scientific productivity only consist of named authors or inventors (not of unnamed participants) and cannot be used to find out who is not named," the researchers around Julia Lane of New York University and Britta Glennon from the University of Pennsylvania. The team therefore brought together an extensive data set by research teams, publications and patents. To check their results, they also conducted a survey among scientists.
For their study, they finally evaluated the data of 128,859 people from 9,778 teams in the USA over a period of four years, including information about the respective field of research and career stage, and compared the names with 39,426 journal articles and 7,675 patents. They examined how many people on a team become authors and found that women make up almost half of the workforce (48.25 percent), but only become study authors in 34.85 percent of cases. Compared to the average of all team members, the probability of being named as an author in the article of one's own research team is 13 percent lower, the chances decrease with increasing influence of the article (published in particularly respected journals, often cited). "At least some of the observed gender-specific difference in scientific output is therefore probably not due to differences in the research contribution, but to differences in the crediting," the article says.
The abilities of women are frequently undervalued
In order to check their data qualitatively and to find out the causes, the researchers also sent a questionnaire to 28,000 people. In essence, the results confirmed the conjectures. Of the 2,660 scientists who responded, 43 percent of women and 37.8 percent of men reported that they had already experienced not being named as a co-author in an article, even though they had contributed to the research work. In most cases, they attributed the non-authorship to the fact that their performance had been underestimated by their colleagues (women: 49 percent, men: 39 percent). 15.5 percent of women and 7.7 percent of men cited targeted discrimination as a possible reason. 37.7 percent of men and 24.7 percent of women stated that their research contribution was actually not sufficient for authorship. However, according to the results of the survey, women also had to do a little more to be mentioned as a co-author. Whether planning, analysis, writing the first draft or software programming – they crossed out an average of 6.34 out of 14 possible fields, men, on the other hand, only 6.11.
However, Lane and Co also indicate some important restrictions; The data of the research teams examined may not be representative of the experience of all researchers, since they almost exclusively use data research -intensive universities. In addition, the additional surcharge data raised came from a wide sample, but only from one that focuses on an actual authorship, so that they did not take into account the experiences of those who have never become authors at all. And the response rate was almost 10 percent low.
Overall, the researchers acknowledge, it is a self -reinforcing vicious circle: if young scientists are not taken into account as study authors, they are discouraged early and break off their academic career prematurely. Then again they are missing as study authors - and other young colleagues as role models. The researchers write to break through that vicious cycle is a goal of this investigation. And at least in the case of Rosalind Franklin it is now known which decisive contribution she has made to discover the DNA structure. But who knows how many women are denied this late recognition forever.
