Women make up less than one-fifth of last authorships in influential journals

In June, the Nature Index released the results of a new analysis that tracked author genders across first and last authorships in the natural and health sciences. The analysis showed how gender gaps in first and last authorship have barely shifted over the past decade, despite women’s participation in science generally increasing over that period.

In the natural sciences, for example, women represented 29% of first-author positions and 17% of last-author positions in 2025, up from 28% and 15%, respectively, in 2015. The analysis looked at author gender ratios in first and last authorships by broad subject area, research topic and by journal.

Looking more closely at the journal-level analysis, we can see how women’s representation in first and last authorship positions — which are often used as markers of scientific contribution and leadership — have changed over time in some of the most well-known titles.

The table below compares the female first authorship ratio over a ten-year period for the top ten journals by total number of first authorships in 2025.

For example, Nature Communications, which had 4,860 authorships for which gender could be inferred in 2025, increased its female first-authorship ratio from 27% in 2015 to 34% in 2025. This is still far from gender parity (defined as having women make up 40–60% of these authorships), but an increase of 7 percentage points is the highest among this group of journals. (The Nature Index and Nature Portfolio journals share the same publisher, Springer Nature, but are editorially independent.)

Science Advances also increased its female first-authorship percentage by 7 percentage points over the period.

It is important to note that the number of articles that are published by a journal and tracked by the index each year can fluctuate, and for some of these journals, that means a big jump or fall in total authorships between 2015 and 2025.

It’s not clear what effect, if any, these changes might have had on journals’ author gender ratios (Advanced Functional Materials had a 266% increase in total authorships for the period, but no change in female first-authorship ratio, for example), which makes direct comparison between journals difficult.

What the data do show is that among the ten journals in the Nature Index with the most authorships in 2025, eight did not improve their rate of female first authorships by more than four percentage points in the span of a decade. And six of them had women make up less than one-third of first authorships in 2025.

Looking at the female last-authorship ratio for the same set of journals, we see a similar pattern, only this time none of the journals increased the rate by more than four percentage points. And in seven of them, women made up less than one-fifth of last authorships in 2025:

Broadening the view

The top ten journals by output in the index are mainly focused on chemistry and physical sciences, so to give a broader overview of authorship trends over time, we selected a second set of journals from a pool of the top 40 journals by total number of first authorships in 2025. This second set was selected to include some of the best-known titles, such as Nature and Science, and titles that reflect more disciplines, such as Macromolecules and Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

This set includes some journals that achieved much higher female first-authorship ratios than the first set of journals. PLOS Genetics and Proceedings of the Royal Society B, for example, achieved 50% female first authorships in 2025 (though their total number of authorships were much lower than those in the first set of journals).

This reflects a broader trend in the analysis, which found that female authorship ratios — in both first and last positions — tended to be much higher in the biological sciences (which PLOS Genetics and Proceedings of the Royal Society B primarily publish articles in) than in chemistry or the physical sciences.

Looking at the last-authorship gender ratio for this journal set, the female percentage for 2025 is on average higher than for the first set of journals, although only four achieved a rate of more than one-fifth:

There are several limitations to these data. For example, gender has been inferred from author names by an artificial intelligence model, rather than being self‑reported. In addition, the data only account for binary (male and female) genders and are incomplete for some countries, such as China and Singapore. This could have some effect on a subject level. For example, journals that publish more articles by China-based researchers (who publish most commonly in chemistry in the index) would have less complete data than journals with a high percentage of US-based authors.

These data cannot be treated as definitive and should not be used in isolation to make judgements about an individual journal. However, the analysis can be a useful tool to track the change in female authorship over time — and one that could provide a benchmark to assess whether certain diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives run by institutions and publishers are working as intended.

View the whole journal-level dataset on the Nature Index website.