Contemporary psychology and women: A gender analysis of the scientific production

Abstract

Despite important advances made in recent decades, women are still underrepresented in science (less than 30% of authorships). This study presents a bibliometric analysis of all the Psychology articles published in 2009 included in the Web of Science database (Thomson Reuters) in order to examine the contribution of women in contemporary Psychology, their pattern of research collaboration, the scientific content and the scientific impact from a gender perspective. From a total of 90,067 authorships, gender could be identified in 74,413 (82.6%) of them, being 40,782 (54.8%) male authorships and 33,631 (45.2%) female authorships. These data corresponded to 24,477 (49.9%) individual men and 24,553 (50.1%) women, respectively. Therefore, Psychology presents gender parity in the number of authors, and a gender asymmetry in the number of authorships that it is much lower than in science in general and other specific scientific fields. In relative terms, women tend to be concentrated in the first position of the authorship by-line and much less in the last (senior) position. This double pattern suggests that age probably plays a role in (partly) explaining the slight gender disparity of authorships.