A study led by a Georgia Tech researcher analyzing more than a century of climate science publications has found that women in the field are just as productive and successful as their male peers. However, they tend to have shorter careers and therefore fewer total publications. 

According to the study, women are 90% as likely as men to maintain their careers.

The research offers one of the deepest looks at publications and gender dynamics in climate science. The field is unique because it blends male-dominated areas of study — geosciences and engineering — with those that are majority-women, including sociology, public health, and life sciences. 

The study examined more than 400,000 publications between 1903 and 2018. The findings, which don’t include topics such as salaries, number of women in the field, or tenure rates, are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The study found that when it comes to overall and first-author publications, there were only small differences between the average for men and women. This indicates that the overall distributions of men and women were nearly identical. In fact, the researchers said, that if a man and a woman were randomly picked from the pool, there is a good chance (just slightly less than 50%) that the woman would have more publications than the mean. 

The researchers also found little evidence of peer review biases: Articles authored by women were accepted at similar rates in prestigious journals like Science and Nature.