Women’s participation in academia has increased in the last few decades across many fields (e.g., Computer Science, History, and Medicine). This increase has given rise to new research emphases and directions, including recognizing women’s health within the domain of medicine and leveraging women’s experiences to create interventions and shape public policies that address social inequalities. However, the increments of women’s participation within academia vary across fields, and extensive evidence shows women-men disparities related to academic productivity and career lengths, cumulative advantages, and research agendas.

During this presentation, I will first show historical evidence and exemplify the disparities some women scientists have faced in computation, arts, and physics. The first part of the presentation will summarise the bibliographies of these women and which identities they experienced to answer questions such as: who is allowed in the world of science and who is recognized as a science person in specific contexts?

Then, I will show the results of our data-intensive methods to understand how gender participation across fields is related to gender representation in productivity (number of papers), research impact (number of citations), and co-authorship networks (degrees, number of co-authors). Specifically, we studied women’s participation and representation in top-ranking positions in different fields over time. We also analyzed how gender homophily in co-authorships plays a role in different ranking categories. To do so, we explored the Semantic Scholar Open Research Corpus dataset, divided into 19 academic fields and composed of more than 200 million papers published from 1975 to 2020.

Our work highlights that diversity does not necessarily imply inclusion because the increase in women’s participation in social sciences did not increase the likelihood of women reaching top-ranked positions. Thus, our paper opens a discussion of the need for intervention strategies to increase the co-authorships between both genders that can better distribute and balance resources, recognition, and representation of women, and other underrepresented genders.