Gender Dynamics in Work Stress Intervention Research over 47 Years: A Bibliometric Analysis

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for the opportunity to read your manuscript, “Gender Dynamics in Work Stress Intervention Research over 47 Years: A Bibliometric Analysis.” I like that you took a method common in other fields to apply it to Occupational Safety and Health to understand gender differences in publication productivity. I have provided feedback on both major and minor points. The major points are organized by importance; the minor points are organized by where they show up in the manuscript.

Major:

1. Why Is Qualitative Research Not Included in Your Bibliometric Analysis? Thank you for being very clear about your inclusion and exclusion criteria. Is there a reason that your study excludes qualitative designs? This question may be related to my lack of knowledge about the Occupational Safety and Health research field, so I apologize if this inclusion criteria is common in your field. I especially wondered why some research designs were included and excluded and whether there were gender patterns in terms of who publishes what kinds of research designs in the Occupational Safety and Health literature?
2. What Does Corresponding Author Status Mean in OSH? Does corresponding author have status in the Occupational Safety and Health research? I ask because in my area of research, the corresponding author is generally the first author, but it does not have to be. When someone else takes the role, it is not necessarily a mark of status; often a different person is the corresponding author because they are more likely to be available and responsive should the manuscript receive an R&R as compared to the first author (for example, when the first author is moving institutions, going on sabbatical, taking parental leave, etc.). I wonder if the same pattern occurs in this research field, which may explain why you did not find much difference between men and women in terms of corresponding authorship. Make clear why you chose to look at corresponding authorship in the Method.
3. What Does Last Authorship Status Mean in OSH? Similarly, does last authorship mean something in this research field? In my field, it often signals whichever author made the least contribution to a manuscript, but it can also be a senior author who was brought onto the paper when before submission or often during the R&R process to help address specific concerns with the paper. If that is the case in the Occupational Safety and Health research field, the fact that men are more likely to be last authors could indicate that a lot of the last authors on papers are more senior researchers in the field. It seems in your analysis that you allude to the fact that last authors are often the most senior authors on a manuscript. If that is the case, I would make this assumption clear in your Method to explain why you measured last authorship. (You do this in the Discussion section, so make sure to note it in the Method section.)
4. Determining Pipeline Problems from Leaky Pipeline Problems: For determining if women in last authorship positions is a pipeline or leaky pipeline problem, was there a threshold or cutoff you used to determine when these numbers were no longer just a pipeline problem but a leaky pipeline problem? For example, if female first authorships go up in one year, how long do you expect it to take to move those female authors to last authorship positions as senior authors? 5 years? 10 years? 15 years? Without knowing what the threshold is, it isn’t completely clear when the pipeline problem turned into a leaky pipeline problem in the field, which is an important question because it suggests different solutions to the problem.
5. Can You Compare the Publication Data You Analyzed to the Numbers of Men and Women in Doctoral Programs and Faculty/Research Positions in the Field? It would be interesting to compare your results in terms of publications from 1977 to 2023 to the trends in men and women in graduate school and entering the field (if the data is available). Is there a lag (as would be expected) between proportion of men and women in graduate school and men and women in authorship? How big is the general lag? Are the trends about even in that the proportion of women going to graduate school increases at about the same rate as female authorship after a lag?
6. Can You Add Data about the Fields that Researchers Come from to Find Patterns with Authorship and Doctoral Field? You may be able to test whether the differences in female and male productivity have to do with the fields that the researchers come from by looking at the doctoral degree that each of the authors earned (via their CV). This would be interesting information and would give you more insight into whether pipeline or leaky pipeline problems are specific to certain fields/training.
7. How is Work Stress Intervention Research Representative of the Field? You note at the end of the Introduction that you focused on work stress intervention research as the context for your bibliometric study. You mention it is a central and representative topic in the discipline. Why is this so? Is this a topic that has a long history? Is studied in the fields that Occupational Safety and Health professionals come from (e.g., law, psychology, ergonomics, etc.)? Can you give some data showing how prevalent this topic is in the discipline, how many men vs. women publish in this area, where this research is published (top journals, a variety of journals, etc.), etc.? I am less familiar with Occupational Safety and Health, so this data would be helpful in understanding how the topic of work stress intervention represents the field.

Minor:

1. In the second paragraph of the Introduction, add something to the end of the sentence, “Despite significant progress toward gender equality in recent years, women remain underrepresented…” in what? This will either establish your introduction from general to specific (e.g., underrepresentation in the sciences or academia) or the specific area you are researching (e.g., in occupational health).
2. In psychology, as noted in your Introduction, women dominate the undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral levels. Do you have data about how that looks for post-doc, faculty, and/or research positions? For example, are women at least half or more of junior faculty or junior researcher positions? How do these numbers change as we move from junior to senior positions in the field? Mentioning this trend in the field would transition into and support the next paragraph where you discuss the pipeline theory.
3. I appreciate that you provided context for readers about the Occupational Safety and Health field, including the fields in which professionals studied. My expertise is in gender equity efforts generally and in specific business fields and professions, but not in Occupational Safety and Health specifically.
4. Why is the FAOR for first author so high from 1977-1982? Was the field female-dominated at this point as compared to later years?
5. Could the lack of difference in female and male productivity also be related to the fact that few manuscripts are single-authored and more are written in teams, and that many of the teams include both male and female co-authors?

Author Response

Comment 1: Why Is Qualitative Research Not Included in Your Bibliometric Analysis? Thank you for being very clear about your inclusion and exclusion criteria. Is there a reason that your study excludes qualitative designs? This question may be related to my lack of knowledge about the Occupational Safety and Health research field, so I apologize if this inclusion criteria is common in your field. I especially wondered why some research designs were included and excluded and whether there were gender patterns in terms of who publishes what kinds of research designs in the Occupational Safety and Health literature?

Response: We appreciate the reviewer’s feedback. As noted in Appendix A (page 18, lines 720-726), this study is part of a broader research project examining the effectiveness of work-related stress interventions. For this reason, the eligibility criteria followed the scope and methodological standards established in the seminal evidence-based reviews within this area (Kröl et al. 2017; LaMontagne et al. 2007; van der Klink et al. 2001; Richardson and Rothstein 2007), all of which restrict their analyses to quantitative intervention studies and do not include qualitative designs. We therefore adopted these criteria to ensure comparability with the core intervention literature and to maintain methodological consistency across the studies examined. Given this focus, qualitative research was outside the scope of the present bibliometric analysis. As a result, potential gender patterns in who publishes qualitative versus quantitative designs could not be assessed within this dataset. We acknowledge, however, that this represents an interesting line of inquiry for future research, particularly for understanding gendered participation across different methodological traditions within the broader Occupational Safety and Health literature. For this reason, we have included this point in the Limitations and future research section on page 16, lines 651-656:

“Furthermore, the scope of this study was restricted to quantitative intervention designs, following the standards established in the core evidence-based reviews of work-related stress interventions (Kröl et al. 2017; LaMontagne et al. 2007; van der Klink et al. 2001; Richardson and Rothstein 2007). Future research should therefore examine whether gender patterns emerge across different methodological traditions, particularly qualitative approaches.”

 

Comment 2: What Does Corresponding Author Status Mean in OSH? Does corresponding author have status in the Occupational Safety and Health research? I ask because in my area of research, the corresponding author is generally the first author, but it does not have to be. When someone else takes the role, it is not necessarily a mark of status; often a different person is the corresponding author because they are more likely to be available and responsive should the manuscript receive an R&R as compared to the first author (for example, when the first author is moving institutions, going on sabbatical, taking parental leave, etc.). I wonder if the same pattern occurs in this research field, which may explain why you did not find much difference between men and women in terms of corresponding authorship. Make clear why you chose to look at corresponding authorship in the Method.

Response: We think this is an excellent suggestion. Accordingly, to clarify why corresponding authorship was included as one of the authorship roles analysed, we have now expanded the Method section to define each authorship position and its relevance in the field (page 6, lines 246-255):

“Specifically, first authorship is typically associated with the researcher who led the study and contributed most substantially to the manuscript (Fox et al. 2018). Corresponding author denotes the individual responsible for managing the submission process, communicating with the journal, and responding to inquiries (Page et al. 2019). Last authorship is commonly reserved for the senior researcher or principal investigator who oversaw the project and provided strategic guidance, thereby representing leadership and supervisory responsibility (Baerlocher et al. 2007). These authorship positions can influence the credit researchers receive for their contributions and are crucial for hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions in scientific fields (Fox et al. 2018; Wren et al. 2007).”

 

Comment 3: What Does Last Authorship Status Mean in OSH? Similarly, does last authorship mean something in this research field? In my field, it often signals whichever author made the least contribution to a manuscript, but it can also be a senior author who was brought onto the paper when before submission or often during the R&R process to help address specific concerns with the paper. If that is the case in the Occupational Safety and Health research field, the fact that men are more likely to be last authors could indicate that a lot of the last authors on papers are more senior researchers in the field. It seems in your analysis that you allude to the fact that last authors are often the most senior authors on a manuscript. If that is the case, I would make this assumption clear in your Method to explain why you measured last authorship. (You do this in the Discussion section, so make sure to note it in the Method section.)

Response: We agree with this suggestion. As noted in a previous comment, and following the reviewer’s recommendation, we have now made this rationale explicit in the Method section on page 6, lines 246-255:

“Specifically, first authorship is typically associated with the researcher who led the study and contributed most substantially to the manuscript (Fox et al. 2018). Corresponding author denotes the individual responsible for managing the submission process, communicating with the journal, and responding to inquiries (Page et al. 2019). Last authorship is commonly reserved for the senior researcher or principal investigator who oversaw the project and provided strategic guidance, thereby representing leadership and supervisory responsibility (Baerlocher et al. 2007). These authorship positions can influence the credit researchers receive for their contributions and are crucial for hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions in scientific fields (Fox et al. 2018; Wren et al. 2007).”

 

Comment 4: Determining Pipeline Problems from Leaky Pipeline Problems: For determining if women in last authorship positions is a pipeline or leaky pipeline problem, was there a threshold or cutoff you used to determine when these numbers were no longer just a pipeline problem but a leaky pipeline problem? For example, if female first authorships go up in one year, how long do you expect it to take to move those female authors to last authorship positions as senior authors? 5 years? 10 years? 15 years? Without knowing what the threshold is, it isn’t completely clear when the pipeline problem turned into a leaky pipeline problem in the field, which is an important question because it suggests different solutions to the problem.

Response: We think that this is a relevant suggestion. In the revised Discussion, we have incorporated this clarification (page 14, lines 551-559):

“It is important to note that in the academic system, promotion from assistant to associate professor may require 5-7 years, and an additional 5-7 years may be needed to reach full professorship, resulting in a total trajectory of approximately 10-15 years (Papaconstantinou and Laimore 2006). Taking these timelines into account, researchers entering the earliest cohorts (e.g., 1983–1988) would be expected to reach senior positions and appear more prominently in last authorship roles 10-15 years later (e.g., 1995–2000), and similarly for more recent cohorts. However, this expected progression is not reflected in the authorship patterns observed, indicating the persistent underrepresentation of women at senior levels.”

 

Additionaly, the following reference was included in the reference list:

Papaconstantinou, Harry T. and Terry C. Laimore. 2006. Academic Appointment and the Process of Promotion and Tenure. Clinic in Colon and Rectal Surgery 19: 143-147. https://doi.org/10.1055/s-2006-948026

 

Comment 5: Can You Compare the Publication Data You Analyzed to the Numbers of Men and Women in Doctoral Programs and Faculty/Research Positions in the Field? It would be interesting to compare your results in terms of publications from 1977 to 2023 to the trends in men and women in graduate school and entering the field (if the data is available). Is there a lag (as would be expected) between proportion of men and women in graduate school and men and women in authorship? How big is the general lag? Are the trends about even in that the proportion of women going to graduate school increases at about the same rate as female authorship after a lag?

Response: We agree that examining how authorship trends compare to the proportion of men and women entering doctoral programs and academic positions would be a valuable line of inquiry. However, conducting such an analysis is beyond the scope of the present study. This comparison would require detailed longitudinal data on graduate enrollment, doctoral completion, and faculty or research appointments across the multiple disciplines that contribute to the field under study (e.g., Psychology, Medicine, Ergonomics, Law), as well as across different countries. Given the interdisciplinary and international nature of Occupational Safety and Health and work stress intervention research, assembling and harmonizing these data would constitute a substantial project in its own right. Indeed, there are studies that have focused specifically on mapping gender representation across academic career stages (e.g. [1]), highlighting the complexity of such analyses. While this would be a highly informative avenue for future research, addressing it systematically would require a new research approach than the one undertaken here.

[1] Alfano, Vincenzo, Lorenzo Cicatiello, Giuseppe Lucio Gaeta, and Mauro Pinto. 2025. The gender gap in the early progression of academic careers: evidence from Italy. International Journal of Manpower 46: 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJM-01-2024-0030

 

Comment 6: Can You Add Data about the Fields that Researchers Come from to Find Patterns with Authorship and Doctoral Field? You may be able to test whether the differences in female and male productivity have to do with the fields that the researchers come from by looking at the doctoral degree that each of the authors earned (via their CV). This would be interesting information and would give you more insight into whether pipeline or leaky pipeline problems are specific to certain fields/training.

Response: We appreciate this observation. The focus of the present study is to examine gendered patterns in work stress intervention research within the Occupational Safety and Health field. This focus is particularly relevant given the interdisciplinary nature of Occupational Safety and Health, which brings together researchers trained in traditionally female- or male-dominated disciplines. Our aim was therefore to analyze how gender disparities manifest within this integrated research space, rather than to disentangle patterns associated with individual disciplinary pathways. While examining the specific disciplinary backgrounds of authors is indeed a valuable line of inquiry, conducting such an analysis falls outside the scope of the current study. Understanding gender dynamics within each contributing discipline would require a separate and specific approach.

 

Comment 7: How is Work Stress Intervention Research Representative of the Field? You note at the end of the Introduction that you focused on work stress intervention research as the context for your bibliometric study. You mention it is a central and representative topic in the discipline. Why is this so? Is this a topic that has a long history? Is studied in the fields that Occupational Safety and Health professionals come from (e.g., law, psychology, ergonomics, etc.)? Can you give some data showing how prevalent this topic is in the discipline, how many men vs. women publish in this area, where this research is published (top journals, a variety of journals, etc.), etc.? I am less familiar with Occupational Safety and Health, so this data would be helpful in understanding how the topic of work stress intervention represents the field.

Response: We agree that clarifying why work stress intervention research is a central and representative topic within the Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) field can strengthen the study's rationale. For this reason, we have expanded the Introduction to provide additional justification. The revised text now reads as follows on page 3, lines 131-143.

“Work-related stress has long been recognized as a central and representative topic in this discipline, given its strong associations with occupational health outcomes, productivity, absenteeism, and organizational functioning. It has become one of the most studied psychosocial risks internationally (Cassar et al. 2020), and major governmental agencies (e.g., European Commission 2021b; International Labour Organization 2016) identify its prevention and management as a priority area. The topic has been investigated across disciplines that contribute to OSH, including Psychology, Occupational Medicine, Public Health, and Ergonomics, among others. Furthermore, evidence-based reviews (e.g., Kröl et al. 2017; LaMontagne et al. 2007; Richardson and Rothstein 2008; van der Klink et al. 2001) show that work stress intervention research has generated a substantial and cumulative body of empirical studies over several decades. These reviews also identify consistent publication activity in high-impact journals, underscoring the topic's visibility and relevance within the discipline.”

Further, the following new references were added to the reference list.

European Commission. 2021b. EU strategic framework on health and safety at work 2021-2027 Occupational safety and health in a changing world of work.

International Labour Organization. 2016. Workplace stress: A collective challenge. International Labour Office.

LaMontagne, Anthony, D., Tessa Keegel, Amber M. Louie, Aleck Ostry, and Paul A. Landsbergis. 2007. A Systematic Review of the Job-stress Intervention Evaluation Literature, 1990–2005. International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health 13, 268-280. https://doi.org/10.1179/oeh.2007.13.3.268

 

Comment 8: In the second paragraph of the Introduction, add something to the end of the sentence, “Despite significant progress toward gender equality in recent years, women remain underrepresented…” in what? This will either establish your introduction from general to specific (e.g., underrepresentation in the sciences or academia) or the specific area you are researching (e.g., in occupational health).

Response: We thank the reviewer for pointing this out. As suggested, we have added “in science” to the end of the sentence on page 1, line 39:

“Despite significant progress toward gender equality in recent years, women remain underrepresented in science (Astegiano et al. 2019; Holman et al. 2018).”

 

Comment 9: In psychology, as noted in your Introduction, women dominate the undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral levels. Do you have data about how that looks for post-doc, faculty, and/or research positions? For example, are women at least half or more of junior faculty or junior researcher positions? How do these numbers change as we move from junior to senior positions in the field? Mentioning this trend in the field would transition into and support the next paragraph where you discuss the pipeline theory.

Response: We agree with the reviewer’s assessment. Therefore, in order to address this point, we have added the following information to the revised manuscript on page 2, lines 83-90:

“The case of psychology is highly illustrative, as the field is dominated by women at the undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral levels, but dominated by men at higher academic levels (Gruber et al. 2021; Eagly and Miller 2016). For example, in the United States, women represent approximately 78% of undergraduates and 71% of graduate students in Psychology (Gruber et al. 2021); nevertheless, Cynkar (2007) reported that only 25% of full professors at graduate departments of Psychology are women, and even more recent estimates still place women below men at this rank, with women accounting for 45.5% of full professors (Casad et al. 2022).”

 

The reference list was completed with the following references:

Casad, Bettina J., Christina E. Garasky, Taylor R. Jancetic, Anne K. Brown, Jillian E. Franks, and Christopher R. Bach. 2022. U.S. Women Faculty in the Social Sciences Also Face Gender Inequalities. Frontiers in Psychology 23. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.792756

Cynkar, Amy. 2007. The changing gender composition of psychology. Monitor on Psychology 38: 46.

 

 

Comment 10: I appreciate that you provided context for readers about the Occupational Safety and Health field, including the fields in which professionals studied. My expertise is in gender equity efforts generally and in specific business fields and professions, but not in Occupational Safety and Health specifically.

Response: We sincerely appreciate the reviewer for these considerations.

 

Comment 11: Why is the FAOR for first author so high from 1977-1982? Was the field female-dominated at this point as compared to later years?

Response: In the 1977–1982 cohort, there were four female first authorships compared to one male first authorship. As a result, women showed higher odds of occupying the first authorship position in the work stress intervention research analysed for this period. The high FAOR value is largely driven by the small number of publications in these early years, which makes the ratio especially sensitive to minor fluctuations in author gender.

 

Comment 12: Could the lack of difference in female and male productivity also be related to the fact that few manuscripts are single-authored and more are written in teams, and that many of the teams include both male and female co-authors?

Response: We thank the reviewer for this insightful question. We have incorporated this explanation into the discussion section to clarify how authorship type may help interpret the balanced productivity results on pages 14-15, lines 574-580:

“The authorship type could help explain these results. Although women accounted for most single-authored papers (90.0%), the publications analyzed were predominantly multi-authored (93.8%). This strong prevalence of team-based research, coupled with the broader decline in single-authored papers (Larivière et al. 2015; Wuchty et al. 2007) may reduce observable differences in individual productivity, as publication output is shared across team members rather than reflecting solely the productivity of a single author.”

Additionally, we have completed the reference list with two new references that support this point:

Larivière, Vincent, Yves Gingras, Cassidy R. Sugimoto, and Andrew Tsou. 2015. Team size matters: Collaboration and scientific impact since 1900. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 66: 1323-1332. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23266

Wuchty, Stefan, Benjamin F. Jones, and Brian Uzzi. 2007. The Increasing Dominance of Teams in Production of Knowledge. Science 316: 1036-1039. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1136099

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for the opportunity to review this manuscript. I offer the following feedback to strengthen the research.

1. This study employed a 'successive five-year cohorts' approach to disentangle age effects from career stage effects and examine the leaky pipeline phenomenon (i.e., gender disparities) in research productivity. While this cohort-based approach effectively identifies patterns across career stages, it may not capture the precise critical junctures at which academic attrition occurs.
2. While Gender API provides a systematic approach to gender estimation, relying solely on name-based algorithms has notable limitations. Names can be unisex or culturally ambiguous, and individuals may use names that do not align with typical gender associations. The authors should acknowledge these limitations and, ideally, validate their gender classifications.
3. The discussion section would benefit from explaining why gender disparities in first, corresponding, and last authorships show different trends across cohorts. Such analysis would illuminate the historical-social context of work pressures facing women researchers.

Author Response

Comment 1: This study employed a 'successive five-year cohorts' approach to disentangle age effects from career stage effects and examine the leaky pipeline phenomenon (i.e., gender disparities) in research productivity. While this cohort-based approach effectively identifies patterns across career stages, it may not capture the precise critical junctures at which academic attrition occurs.

Response: We thank the reviewer for pointing this out. Although our dataset allows us to track authors’ entry into the successive five-year cohorts, it does not include individual-level information on critical exit points or on factors that may disrupt research activity, particularly those with a significant gendered burden (e.g., career interruptions linked to maternity or caregiving responsibilities). This point aligns with the third limitation already included in the manuscript, where we highlight the need to investigate the underlying mechanisms behind gender differences in publication trajectories. Therefore, we have added this as a limitation on page 16, lines 640-646:

“Third, while this study effectively identified gender differences in bibliometric trends, it did not explore the underlying causes of these gender gaps. In this sense, a successive five-year cohort approach (Cascio and Aguinis 2008; Filardo et al. 2016) was employed to examine evolving patterns and track authors’ entry in the field. However, the study did not capture individual-level information on critical exit points or on factors that may disrupt researchers’ productivity, particularly those with a significant gender burden (e.g., career interruptions linked to maternity or caregiving responsibilities).”

 

Comment 2: While Gender API provides a systematic approach to gender estimation, relying solely on name-based algorithms has notable limitations. Names can be unisex or culturally ambiguous, and individuals may use names that do not align with typical gender associations. The authors should acknowledge these limitations and, ideally, validate their gender classifications.

Response: We agree with the reviewer’s assessment. Accordingly, we validated the gender detection tool using our dataset by comparing the algorithm’s output with manual gender coding. This information has been incorporated into the manuscript on pages 6, lines 237-241:

“Additionally, to evaluate the suitability of Gender API for the current dataset, we validated the algorithm’s inference against manual coding using 100 randomly selected cases. Gender API correctly classified 97% of manually coded names (K = .94) with an average accuracy of 96.5%, almost 30 percentage points above the threshold commonly applied in previous studies (Dworkin et al. 2020; Fulvio et al. 2021).”

As suggested, in the revised limitations, we have included the constraints associated with using Gender API on page 16, lines 632–639:

“Gender API was employed to assign gender to those authors whose gender could not be determined from public sources (e.g., descriptions and pronouns on professional or private websites, or other online records). Although this tool has been widely used in bibliometric research (Abramo et al. 2022; Dworkin et al. 2020; Fulvio et al. 2021; Thelwall 2020) and has provided good levels of accuracy in the sample under study, name-based algorithms can produce errors (Sebo 2021), as names may be unisex or culturally ambiguous. Future studies might therefore consider validating the gender detection tool on the specific sample to determine its classification error rate.”

Further, the following reference was added to the reference list:

Sebo, Paul. 2021. Performance of gender detection tools: a comparative study name to gender inference services. Journal of Medical Library Association 109. https://doi.org/10.5195/jmla.2021.1185

 

 

Comment 3: The discussion section would benefit from explaining why gender disparities in first, corresponding, and last authorships show different trends across cohorts. Such analysis would illuminate the historical-social context of work pressures facing women researchers.

Response: We thank the reviewer for this thoughtful observation. The explanation for the different patterns observed in first, corresponding, and last authorships across cohorts. Specifically, the higher representation of women in first authorship roles and their underrepresentation in authorships associated with greater responsibility and leadership (i.e., corresponding and last authorship) is discussed in the manuscript (page 14, lines 534-565), framed within the leaky pipeline framework:

“In most medical and social sciences, first authors are typically associated with early-career researchers who contribute most significantly to the article, while last authors are generally more senior (Ceci et al. 2023; Wren et al. 2007). This pattern suggests that women are more likely to be early-career researchers, whereas men are more likely to occupy senior positions. Other studies (González-Álvarez and Cervera-Crespo 2019; Larivière et al. 2013) indicate that age may play a major role in these gender patterns, reflecting the influx of new female researchers into OSH who publish their initial studies under the guidance of senior researchers. This trend is similar to other fields, such as Psychology, where most of today’s eminent psychologists began their careers several decades ago, when fewer women pursued the discipline. Notwithstanding the growing participation and overrepresentation of women in entry-level authorship positions, men continue to have higher odds of occupying senior and leadership positions, suggesting that women’s advancement to these roles remains limited, consistent with the leaky pipeline theory (Blickenstaff 2005; Monroe and Chiu 2010). Similar trends have been observed in other disciplines, such as Psychology (Eagly and Miller 2016) and Pediatrics (Böhme et al. 2022), in which women are over-represented at early-career stages, but their proportion declines along the academic ladder and only a few reach senior leadership positions. It is important to note that in the academic system, promotion from assistant to associate professor may require 5-7 years, and an additional 5-7 years may be needed to reach full professorship, resulting in a total trajectory of approximately 10-15 years (Papaconstantinou and Laimore 2006). Taking these timelines into account, researchers entering the earliest cohorts (e.g., 1983–1988) would be expected to reach senior positions and appear more prominently in last authorship roles 10-15 years later (e.g., 1995–2000), and similarly for more recent cohorts. However, this expected progression is not reflected in the authorship patterns observed, indicating the persistent underrepresentation of women at senior levels. A concerning issue here is the potential gender bias and discrimination underlying this gap, which may cause women to exit the field or produce research at a slower rate as they advance to more prestigious roles (Cao et al. 2023; Ceci et al. 2023; Llorens et al. 2021; Roper 2019; van den Besselaar and Sandström 2017). This perpetuates that male “star” researchers outperform female “star” scientists (Aguinis et al. 2018) and that women receive less prominence and recognition at senior levels compared to men (Eagly and Miller 2016).”

However, although these trends may reflect broader historical and social dynamics affecting women in academia, the dataset includes publications from authors affiliated with institutions in multiple countries. As a result, it is difficult to draw specific inferences about particular socio-historical changes or policy developments, given that these vary considerably across national contexts.