There has been an increasing body of research noting discrepancies in publication success between male and female researchers in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM). Biological science is one of the few STEMM fields now reaching equal proportions of male and female graduate students. Despite this, we continue to lose a disproportionate number of female biologists with each progressive step towards higher-level positions. This is commonly termed the “leaky pipeline” of women in STEMM. A recent study noted a vital link between early publication output and one's potential to succeed within the biological sciences. When publication metrics play an important role in determining a scientists’ “success”, it is imperative to investigate the factors that may influence a researcher’s publication output, rate, impact, and authorship position, especially at the graduate level – where the leaky pipeline begins. In this study, we compare the above publication metrics across 2,403 PhD students within the biological sciences from 40 institutions in 3 global regions. We fit mixed effects models using each of the above publication metrics as a response variable. Potential effect variables include student gender, advisor gender, advisor rank, lab size, and the proportion of female students in the lab. Best fitting models were selected using likelihood ratio tests.
Results/Conclusions:
Our study revealed that male graduate students are consistently outperforming their female counterparts, despite gender parity in numbers of students. Female PhD students had lower publication output (-26%), rate (-18%), impact (-11%), and number of first author papers being produced (-33%) than their male peers in the same fields. While our analysis clearly highlights the role of student gender in publication outcomes for biological science graduate students, our data do not allow us to decipher the mechanisms causing these patterns. By highlighting the gender biases that continue to exist across STEMM – including the “gender-equal” field of biological sciences - we hope that our results raise awareness and stimulate discussions into how the practice of science can be further developed to help alleviate gender bias and further support female scientists and their progression throughout their careers.