Female scientists are less likely to receive authorship credit or to be named on patents related to the work they do compared with their male counterparts – including in fields such as healthcare, where women dominate – data suggests.
This gender gap may help to explain well-documented disparities in the apparent contributions of male and female scientists – such as that of Rosalind Franklin, whose pivotal contribution to the discovery of the structure of DNA initially went unrecognised because she was not cited on the core Nature article by James Watson and Francis Crick.
