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The undervaluing of elite women in physics

Nature Physics volume 21, pages 1864–1867 (2025)Cite this article

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Elite women in physics wait longer than men for recognition. Once elected to the US National Academy of Sciences, however, their prominence surges — evidence that their work was undervalued all along.

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Fig. 1: Gender and individual productivity and prominence of physicists.
Fig. 2: Gender and NAS membership effects on individual productivity and prominence of physicists.
Fig. 3: NAS election and gendered effects on individual productivity λ and prominence θ for physicists.

Data availability

Publication and citation information were drawn from the OpenAlex bibliographic database following the guidelines at https://openalex.org (ref. 10), and information on National Academy of Sciences (USA) membership was drawn from the NAS directory at https://nasoline.edu.

Code availability

The code used in this study has been deposited in the GitHub repository https://github. com/LleytonLi/LatentVariables.

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Acknowledgements

We thank D. B. Larremore and S. Zhang for helpful discussions. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (62388101, 12441101), Beijing Natural Science Foundation (Z230001), Zhongguancun Laboratory, and Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Future Blockchain and Privacy Computing.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. LMIB, NLSDE, BDBC, and School of Artificial Intelligence, Beihang University, Beijing, China

    Weihua Li

  2. Qianyuan Laboratory, Hangzhou, China

    Weihua Li

  3. Department of Advanced Interdisciplinary Research, Pengcheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, China

    Weihua Li

  4. Zhongguancun Laboratory, Beijing, China

    Weihua Li

  5. Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Future Blockchain and Privacy Computing, Beihang University, Beijing, China

    Weihua Li

  6. Hangzhou International Innovation Institute, Beihang University, Hangzhou, China

    Weihua Li

  7. Beijing Academy of Blockchain and Edge Computing, Beijing, China

    Hongwei Zheng

  8. Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA

    Aaron Clauset

  9. BioFrontiers Institute, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA

    Aaron Clauset

  10. Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM, USA

    Aaron Clauset

Authors
  1. Weihua Li
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  2. Hongwei Zheng
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  3. Aaron Clauset
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Contributions

W.L., H.Z., and A.C. designed research and performed research. W.L. and A.C. wrote the paper. W.L. analysed data and made visualizations.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Hongwei Zheng or Aaron Clauset.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Physics thanks Cassidy Sugimoto and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Li, W., Zheng, H. & Clauset, A. The undervaluing of elite women in physics. Nat. Phys. 21, 1864–1867 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-025-03114-1

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