It is a sad reality that women are less likely to pursue an academic career.

While about the same number of women and men complete a degree, only every third person with a habilitation is a woman and of those with their own chair only every tenth.

Publications in specialist journals are essential for a scientific career, because they are the gateway for habilitation posts, professorships and chairs to receive scholarships, research funds and prizes.

But women publish less than men, which is often explained by the fact that they are not as scientifically productive, for example because they take care of the family more, work in an environment where they do not feel so comfortable, or do not have the right position .

But now a comprehensive study from the United States shows:

Women don't generally do less.

On the contrary, at all stages of their scientific careers and consistently in all disciplines, they appeared less frequently as authors of specialist journals than their achievement would deserve.

The team led by Julia Lane, professor of statistics at the University of New York, collected data from 9,778 research teams in the United States and 128,859 researchers over four years.

They compared the data with 39,426 professional articles and 7,675 patents that had been written or filed by these teams.

A huge data set was created: 17.9 million authorships of specialist articles and 3.2 million patent inventions.

All hierarchies were included - i.e. students, scientific employees at all career levels and professors - as well as all common scientific fields: including physics, biology, mathematics, medicine, social sciences, engineering, computer and earth sciences and agriculture.

Although female researchers did almost half of the work,

on average, only a third of the author lists were women – actually it should have been half as well.

Overall, 21 out of 100 men have ever been named as authors and 12 out of 100 women have been named as authors, even though they had the same workload.

The higher the journal, the lower the chance for women to be named.

Even when the research team calculated out possible influencing factors - such as level of education or position, how long you have been in the team or in which subject - the result did not affect it.

"I was surprised that the effect is so clear and statistically so reliable," says Frauke Kreuter, Professor of Statistics and Data Science at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

It is clearly the task of the team leader to involve all employees fairly and to take any authorship into account.

"Unfortunately, it is difficult to change their behavior in the short term." Training modules could help.

Here, for example, doctoral students learn when they can expect co-authorship, what a scientific contribution is and what is more of an auxiliary work, for which they may only be mentioned in the acknowledgment.

In her team, Kreuter relies on rounds in which she explicitly asks each member: about the contribution, the further projects, their own opinion, wishes or criticism.

She found the result of the New York study shocking that not only 43 percent of the women but also 38 percent of the men did not appear as authors, even though they were involved.

"This shows that the work of researchers is generally not sufficiently recognized.

It is time for a research culture in which respect is normal.”