Disparities extend to lower chance of being named on patents and to areas such as healthcare where women dominate

Female scientists are less likely to receive authorship credit or to be named on patents related to the work they do compared with their male counterparts – including in fields such as healthcare, where women dominate – data suggests.

This gender gap may help to explain well-documented disparities in the apparent contributions of male and female scientists – such as that of Rosalind Franklin, whose pivotal contribution to the discovery of the structure of DNA initially went unrecognised because she was not cited on the core Nature article by James Watson and Francis Crick.

“We have known for a long time that women publish and patent at a lower rate than men. But, because previous data never showed who participated in research, no one knew why,” said Prof Julia Lane at New York University in the US, who led the new research.

Lane and her colleagues analysed administrative data on research projects conducted at 52 US colleges and universities between 2013 and 2016. They matched information about 128,859 scientists to 39,426 journal articles and 7,675 patents, looking at which people who worked on individual projects received credit and which did not.