In computer science, it could more than a century until female scientists publish at the same rate as their male counterparts, if current trends hold, according to ScienceInsider.
A new analysis from researchers at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence examines authorship trends in computer science and biomedical research using data from 2.87 million computer science papers and 11.63 million biomedical research papers published between 1970 and June 2018. As they report in a preprint posted to arXiv, they extracted the author lists and assigned the authors a gender probability based on their names. Using this, they then extrapolated when female and male authors would reach parity.
While they found that the portion of female authors has been increasing over time, the Allen researchers report that in computer science, they except female and male researchers to publish at the same rate by 2137. "We hope that these findings will motivate others in the field to evaluate their relationship to these gender biases and consider ways to improve the status quo," the researchers write in their preprint.
Meanwhile, in biomedical science, they report parity will come a bit quicker, by 2048.