Gender Representation in UK Research Institutions

Gender imbalance in STEM and research, in general, is often discussed, and many initiatives have been put in place to attempt to redress the balance, however, without a quick and easy way to analyse the scale of imbalance within a field of research and institution, and without the means to easily compare progress with others, it is difficult to identify things that are working well to nudge a change in the demographic and to learn from and help others.

In order to make this analysis and comparison as easy as possible, we have created an interactive data visualiser that currently displays the gender splits for fields of research and UK institutions as determined by a gender guesser program that scanned all relevant Dimensions data between 2012 and 2017, with a commitment to extending this to include other countries and updating this with new data so that changes can be monitored over time.

Using Dimensions data and analysis from the interactive data visualisation tool, we confirmed the gender imbalance in UK STEM research is indeed much greater than that in the Arts and Humanities, and despite some Arts and Humanities fields of research in some institutions having more women than men, a snapshot of gender splits across the whole of the UK showed that women are yet to reach gender parity in these subjects. As our interactive visualiser is updated, we hope that the richness of data and the ease of use will make it a useful tool for those monitoring gender balance in all fields of research.