Female participation in science in the past 125 years: An analysis of the Matilda effect over time
Digital Libraries
Summary
The authors studied a big collection of scientific papers from 1900 to 2025 to see how women's roles in science have changed over time. They looked at how often women were listed as the main contact author, which shows who is leading the research. They found that women were mostly left out of these leadership roles throughout much of the 20th century, showing the Matilda effect. But in the last 20 years, this has improved globally, though some fields like physics and regions like Asia still have fewer women leaders compared to health sciences and Latin America.
Authors
Felix Bittmann, Lutz Bornmann
Abstract
The Matilda effect describes the systematic under-recognition of women's scientific contributions. We investigated its historical evolution by analyzing over 220 million publications (1900-2025) from OpenAlex, inferring the gender of roughly 60 million authors. To quantify this under-recognition, we calculated the ratio between the overall share of female authors and female corresponding authors. Because corresponding authorship denotes intellectual leadership and primary academic credit, systematic exclusion from this role directly measures the Matilda effect. Our analysis reveals that overall female participation rose from approximately 10% in the 1910s to over 40% recently. For most of the 20th century, women were disproportionately excluded from corresponding authorship, confirming a historical Matilda effect. However, this trend inverted over the past two decades, indicating a global decline. Despite this overall progress, distinct disparities persist: the physical sciences and Asian countries lag behind, whereas the health sciences and Latin America approach gender parity.