For decades, male dominance in medical research meant little attention was paid to sex differences. Although changing demographics now make it more likely for women researchers to produce discoveries that lead to women’s health patents, the scientific workforce in the United States is still primarily composed of white men.

According to the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), a study co-authored by School of Public Policy Chair Cassidy R. Sugimoto, and Thema Monroe-White, an assistant professor of management information systems at Berry College, found that white and Asian male authors exert an outsized influence on the selection of research topics and are more often listed as the first authors.

The authors of Intersectional Inequalities in Science did a bibliometric analysis of 5 million articles published between 2008 and 2019 and drew data from articles indexed in the Web of Science database. Papers with more than 1.6 million first authors were part of the analysis.

Sugimoto and Monroe-White found that while papers with white first authors had the broadest range of topics, those authored by Black, Latino, and women authors were more specialized. For instance, leading topics for Black women researchers were “black women violation,” “equality promotion,” and “social identity.”

Latino authors were more likely to publish on “racial disparities” and “English-Spanish.” Black, Latino, and women authors often appear as authors only in less-cited fields.

“The ubiquity of white men in science and across topics implies that this demographic group has a wider range of possible strategies to follow and an advantage in the way their scientific capital can be invested, reinforcing inequalities in scholarly outcomes,” the authors wrote in the paper, which was published on Jan. 2, 2022, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). “The compound effect of different citation rates of topics and unequal distribution in topics leads to negative effects for marginalized groups and for science itself, as some topics become systematically less studied,” the researchers added.

The researchers assert that had the distribution of authors matched the U.S. population over the last four decades, researchers would have produced 29% more articles on public health, 26% more on gender-based violence, 25% more on gynecology and gerontology, 20% more on immigrants and minorities, and 18% more on mental health.

“This study highlights the importance of not only expanding gender and racial diversity among researchers in high-impact areas of study but also promoting research in historically underrepresented areas through increased funding,” said Sugimoto, the Tom and Marie Patton Chair in the School of Public Policy.

The research is the start of a line of work examining how the scientific enterprise affects — and is affected by — researchers of color, said Thema Monroe-White, the study’s corresponding author.

“Our research suggests that for minoritized scholars, what we study is framed by our racialized and gendered identities,” added Monroe-White. “This finding pushes against idealized notions of meritocracy in science. Institutions and individual disciplines should take action by amplifying research produced by minoritized scholars, particularly on topics for which they have greater representation yet whose impact remains marginalized.”

Intersectional Inequalities in Science (https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2113067119 ) was published on Jan. 2, 2022, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).