From First Author to Senior Author: Where our systems are failing women faculty

Four out of forty.

That is how many of the world's 40 most influential scientific journals cleared just ONE-FIFTH (!!! 🤦‍♀️) female senior authorship, in a journal-level breakdown Nature Portfolio Index published last week.

It builds on the analysis Nature ran in June: in the natural sciences, women held 29% of first-author positions and 17% of last-author positions in 2025. In 2015, those numbers were 28% and 15%. Over the same decade, women's participation in science rose sharply.

It is tempting to read numbers like these as a supply problem. The rest of this year's data argues otherwise.

🔹 Peer Review: papers with women as first or corresponding author spend 7.4% to 14.6% longer under review. That's across 36.5 million articles in more than 36,000 journals, holding journal, year, length, author count, and readability constant (PLOS Biology, January).

🔹 Funding: new R01 success rates at NIH are roughly equal by gender. Renewals are where women fall behind — and of the 2,291 grants terminated last year, women led 59.8% of terminated assistant-professor projects and 60.2% of those held by doctoral candidates (PNAS, March).

🔹 Promotion: over three decades, women in US academic medicine were 24% less likely to make associate professor and 23% less likely to make full, adjusted for department, cohort year, and race. The gaps have not narrowed since the 1980s (NEJM, 2020).

None of those is a pipeline problem. They are continuation problems, and they cluster at critical transition points — early career to mid career, mid career to senior.

Women arrive at close to parity and then lose time at every gate that converts a first authorship into a last authorship.

What gives me hope is that once we identify the gates, it creates opportunities for them to be opened. 🔓

The review gate belongs to journals: publish turnaround times by author gender, cap reviewer clocks, revisit double-blind (and compensate us peer reviewers while you're at it 😋).

The interruption gate belongs to funders and institutions: bridge funding for terminated and failed-renewal investigators, targeted to the women and underrepresented faculty the cuts hit hardest.

The advancement gate belongs to institutions, and it has three locks:
• Promotion criteria that count publications and grant continuity as if the clock were neutral, when everything above says it is not.
• Time in rank, which runs months longer for the women who do get promoted — a gap nobody has to accept once it is being tracked.
• Retention packages, which we benchmark exhaustively by rank and by field and almost never by gender.

None of this waits on more evidence. The evidence arrived this year.

We have spent our effort on entry. The losses are further along. If we want the senior-author numbers to change, that is where the work is.