The gender gap is narrowing: trends amongst migrant scientists

The gender gap is narrowing: trends amongst migrant scientists
  

An image of a plane on a runway during sunset

Professor Ridhi Kashyap and DPhil student Xinyi Zhao have been featured on Science Sessions, the podcast of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), discussing their research into gender gaps in the world of research and academia.

Co-authored with Emilio Zagheni and Aliakbar Akbaritabar of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, the paper explored gendered differences in the global migration of scholars from 1996 to 2020, based on an analysis of more than 33 million science publications.

Findings showed that female researchers tend to move less or migrate less than male researchers, but that this gender gap has been narrowing over time. Women are experiencing more mobility than they have in the past.

Professor Kashyap said, 

We also found that the origin and destination countries of both male and female researchers increasingly diversified. That means that science is becoming more global, because the countries that researchers are leaving from, but also the places they are going to, are increasingly diverse.

But we found that women, in general, tend to migrate to a narrower range of destinations than men do. So, in that way, we still see a gender disadvantage operating.

Listen to the podcast (and read the transcript!) here.