I saw today on Twitter that a few labs were examining the gender balance of their papers and posting the ratios of male:female authors. It started with this tweet.
This analysis is simple to perform, but interpreting it can be hard. For example, is the research group gender balanced to start with? How many of the authors are collaborators? Nonetheless, I have the data for all of my papers, so I thought I’d take a quick look too.
To note: the papers are organised chronologically from top to bottom. They include my papers from before I was a PI (first eight papers). Only research papers are listed, no reviews or methods papers and only those from my lab (i.e. collaborative papers where I am not corresponding author are excluded).
Female authors are blue-green, males are orange. I am a dark orange colour. The blocks are organised according to author list. Joint first authors are boxed.
To the right is a graphic to show the gender ratio. The size of the circle indicates the number of authors on the paper. This is because a paper with M:F ratio of 1 is excusable with 2 or 3 authors, but not with 8. Most of our papers have only a few authors so it’s not a great metric.
On the whole the balance is petty good. Men and women are equally likely to be first author and they are well-represented in the author list. On the other hand, the lab has always had a healthy gender balance and so I would’ve been surprised to find otherwise.
Edit: I replaced the graphic above after a few errors were pointed out to me. Specifically, some authors added to three papers during revisions that were not in the list I used. Also, it was suggested to me that removing myself from the analysis would be a good idea! This was a good suggestion and the corresponding graphic is below.
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The post title is taken from the band A Certain Ratio a Factory Records staple from the 1980s.