Female professors are increasingly active in academic research at American universities. In some disciplines, women are approaching parity with male counterparts, but in many others a gender gap remains.

A new article in the Chronicle of Higher Education reports on the Eigenfactor Project’s analysis of the gender of academic authors, breaking down the percentages of male and female authors in a number of different fields and subfields. The data set used is constructed from JSTOR article database and organized by fields and chronological period.

The discipline that had the highest number of female authors in the period from 1991 to 2010 was Education, with women representing 46.6% of authors. The field of History had 30.8% female authors during the same period.

Women and gender scholars should examine these findings to assess the current state of the gender gap in the academic sphere.