Estudio Cuantitativo y Cualitativo de Mujeres Físicas Graduadas en la UPV/EHU

The problem

Physics has fewer women than almost any other science, and the gap widens along the career: fewer women publish, their careers are shorter, and they are cited less. The obvious explanations (less productivity per year, less impact per paper) turn out to be mostly wrong when careers are compared properly. The question for this thesis is quantitative first: what does the career of a physicist look like as a time series, where do the trajectories of women and men diverge, and what is the local picture for people who studied physics at the UPV/EHU? The answers are the raw material for the second, human aim of the project: to identify local women physicists and make their trajectories visible to the next generation.

Basis paper

J. Huang, A. J. Gates, R. Sinatra and A.-L. Barabási, “Historical comparison of gender inequality in scientific careers across countries and disciplines”, PNAS 117, 4609–4616 (2020), doi:10.1073/pnas.1914221117.

The authors reconstruct the publishing careers of about 1.5 million scientists across 83 countries and 13 disciplines, and show that the gender gaps in productivity and impact are explained largely by differences in career length and dropout rate, not by yearly output. The method is transparent and reproducible with open data: OpenAlex provides authors, affiliations, publication years and citations for the whole literature under an open licence.

The path

1. Study. The science of science as a physics of social systems: career trajectories as stochastic processes, survival analysis (Kaplan–Meier curves, hazard rates), heavy-tailed productivity and citation distributions, and the methodological pitfalls of inferring gender from names. The Spanish and Basque statistics on physics enrolment and graduation by gender, which are public.

2. Reproduce. Using OpenAlex, rebuild the paper’s core analysis for physics: distributions of career length, yearly productivity and citations per paper by gender, the survival curves that show when careers end, and the decomposition of the total gap into its parts. Matching the published pattern for physics is the checkpoint.

3. Find the gaps and go beyond.

• Restrict the analysis to authors affiliated with the UPV/EHU and, where the data allow it, to physics graduates of the Faculty of Science and Technology; compare the local curves with the global ones.
• Add the Faculty’s own graduation records (in aggregate, with the Faculty’s permission) to measure the gap before the first publication, where bibliometric data are blind.
• Model the dropout: does a simple stochastic model with a gender-dependent hazard reproduce the curves, and what would it take to close the gap?
• The qualitative layer: with informed consent and an ethics review, contact a sample of local women physicists, document their trajectories, and build the database of local role models that motivates the whole project. A later education-innovation project can take it to schools and campuses.

What you need

Probability and statistics from the degree; Python with pandas, requests and Matplotlib, and comfort querying a web API. No laboratory work. Because the data side and the interview side are both substantial, this proposal suits a small team, with clear ethical safeguards around personal data.