RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Between 2014 and 2017, Brazil published approximately 53,300 articles, 72 percent of which were signed as authors or co-authors by female researchers.
Behind Brazil are Argentina, Guatemala, and Portugal, with the participation of women in 67, 66 and 64 percent of published articles, respectively. At the opposite end are El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Chile, with women participating in less than 48 percent of the articles published by each country.
In addition to these countries, the Organization of Ibero-American States (OEI) analyzed the scientific production of Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Spain, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
The data are part of the study “Gender inequalities in Ibero-American scientific production” by the Ibero-American Observatory of Science, Technology, and Society (OCTS), an OEI institution.
The research analyzed the articles published in the so-called Web of Science, a database that gathers more than 20,000 international journals.
“Brazil ranks better than the other countries. I think it’s something we can’t be content with because we have challenges, but it points to the fact that Brazil is moving in the positive direction of more opportunities, of gender equality between men and women,” says Raphael Callou, director of the OEI in Brazil.
Fewer researchers publish
Despite signing most of the articles, when taken into account the number of female researchers who published in the analyzed period, it is lower than that of men. In Brazil, they represent 49 percent of the authors, according to 2017 data.
The percentage remained virtually constant in relation to 2014 when there was 50 percent of female authors.
Based on 2017 figures, Paraguay ranks at the top with 60 percent of female authors. At the other end is Chile, with 37 percent.
Differences also arise between research areas. In Brazil, among the areas analyzed, medicine accounts for the majority of female authors: 56 percent of those who published between 2014 and 2017. Engineering is at the bottom, with the lowest representation, 32 percent.
This reality is part of the daily life of Maria Cristina Tavares, professor of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the State University of Campinas (Unicamp). “In classrooms, girls make up about five percent of students. In the department, we have around 90 male teachers and we are five female teachers,” she says.
“When you go to conferences, there are very few female engineers. You see only suits. If you have 100 works on display, there are usually three or four female researchers,” she adds.
Maria Cristina celebrates the prominent position of women in the number of subscriptions to publications: “Publications today are everything in the academic world. Universities value exhibiting the results of the research.
In order for me to get more scholarships for my students, I need to have a good level of publications and it’s not just the number, it’s the number that means that my work is good,” she says.
The professor, however, emphasizes the low number of female researchers in her field: “The country loses when it doesn’t work with this diversity and all these perspectives”.
Majority among students, a minority among professors
“Publishing has always been difficult, it’s always a process. There are classic, very iconic cases of how this gender stereotype is entrenched. When you read an article by a Chinese author, Polish or Ukrainian, who has a different name, you can hardly imagine that she is a woman, because, in our minds, we believe that these difficult positions are taken by men”, says the biologist from the University of Brasília (UnB) Bárbara Paes.
Passionate about science, the researcher is part of the Dragões de Garagem (“Garage Dragons”) team, designed to disclose scientific findings and challenges about science in Brazil in a simple and appealing way. “There is a resistance from academia itself to recognize that there is a problem,” she says.
According to the 2016 Higher Education Census, the latest edition of the survey, women represent 57.2 percent of students enrolled in undergraduate courses.
They are also the majority among fellows of the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES), a fellowship-funding body linked to the Ministry of Education (MEC), which represents 60 percent of all beneficiaries in graduate and teacher training programs.
Among hired professors, however, the scenario changes; men are the majority. Of the 384,094 active higher education professors, 45.5 percent are women.
Source: Agência Brasil