UNESCO releases its flagship Women in Science factsheet and associated data updates periodically, typically around International Women's Day in February. The 2024 edition, which drew on research data through approximately 2022, offered the most recent comprehensive global picture of women's research participation — and provided an opportunity to assess which of the structural trends documented in this publication over the preceding sixteen years had improved, which had stagnated, and which had moved in the wrong direction.
The headline finding from the 2024 report — that women represented approximately 33 to 34 percent of the world's researchers — was both an improvement from the approximately 29 percent figure from a decade earlier and a reminder that achieving gender parity in research at the global level remained a multi-decade project. The pace of improvement, roughly half a percentage point per year in aggregate, was not accelerating; if anything, the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 had introduced a slight deceleration that the 2022 data was beginning to show signs of recovering from.
Sub-Saharan Africa: Heterogeneity Within the Region
Sub-Saharan Africa's women-in-research picture was the most heterogeneous of the major regions in the UNESCO data, and interpreting the regional aggregate required close attention to the variation within it. The regional figure — approximately 33 percent women researchers — was similar to the global average, but this masked a distribution that ranged from countries where women's research participation was close to or above parity (Namibia, Rwanda, Ghana at various points in the data series) to countries where women's share of researchers was below 20 percent.
The correlates of within-region variation were identifiable but not fully under the control of women-in-science policy. Countries with higher overall female university enrollment rates, stronger secondary education infrastructure for girls, and higher proportions of women in senior government and civil society positions tended to show higher women's research participation. Countries where the research infrastructure was concentrated in a single institution or city, or where the research workforce was heavily dependent on international funding that went through processes with known gender biases, tended to show lower figures.
The post-pandemic trajectory in Sub-Saharan Africa was of particular concern in the 2024 data. Several countries had seen temporary declines in women's research participation during the 2020-2021 period, consistent with the double-burden predictions that this site had made in March 2020 and that subsequent research had confirmed. Whether those declines had fully recovered by 2022 was not consistent across countries, and the recovery in research output by women researchers had been slower in countries where pandemic-era childcare and caregiving disruptions had been most severe.
South and West Asia: Progress and Persistent Gaps
South and West Asia remained the region with the lowest women's research participation globally in the UNESCO 2024 data, with a regional aggregate of approximately 20 to 22 percent. This figure concealed substantial variation between countries at different stages of development and with different educational policy histories, but the regional average had not significantly improved over the preceding decade despite increases in women's higher-education enrollment across the region.
India, as the largest research producer in the region, contributed disproportionately to the regional figure. India's women's research participation had improved modestly since the 2017 country snapshot this site published, but the structural factors — the IIT gender gap, the concentration of research funding in institutions with historically low women's participation, the field distribution that skewed women toward biological sciences and away from engineering — had not fundamentally changed. India's 2023-24 data showed women constituting approximately 28 percent of researchers — above the South and West Asia regional average but below the global figure.
The Arab States component of UNESCO's broader South-West Asia grouping showed a more complex picture. Several Gulf states and some Levantine countries had seen increases in women's research participation that in some cases exceeded OECD averages within specific fields, driven by state investment in university infrastructure and deliberate policy attention to women's higher-education participation. The pattern in these countries was in some respects the inverse of the developed-world pattern: high women's enrollment in universities driven by policy, with the question of whether that enrollment was translating into sustained research careers still being worked through.
Latin America: The Regional Leader's Ongoing Story
Latin America and the Caribbean continued to be the world region with the highest women's research participation in the UNESCO 2024 data, with a regional aggregate approaching 47 percent. This was not new — the region had been above the global average for the period of this site's existence — and the mechanisms were also not new: strong women's university enrollment, cultural norms around women's education and professional participation that were, at least in some countries, less restrictive than in other world regions, and the specific field distribution of research activity in the region (biological and health sciences were a large share of regional research, and these fields had higher women's participation everywhere).
Brazil remained the dominant contributor to the regional figure. The 2019 country snapshot this site had published captured a picture that had changed in some respects by 2024: the Lula administration (returned to office in January 2023) had reversed some of the science-funding contractions of the Bolsonaro years, and Brazilian federal universities had returned to a trajectory of graduate enrollment growth that the pandemic and political disruption had interrupted. Women's overall research participation had been broadly maintained through the difficult years.
Fields Where Women Are Over- and Under-Represented
The 2024 UNESCO data reconfirmed the field-distribution pattern that had been stable across the entire period of this site's coverage: women researchers were over-represented relative to the aggregate researcher average in biological sciences, health sciences, and (in many regions) chemistry; under-represented in physical sciences, engineering, and information and communication technology research. The magnitude of the under-representation in engineering and ICT research had not significantly changed from the figures documented in earlier years.
The field-distribution story was important for the international policy conversation for a specific reason: the fields where women were most under-represented — engineering, ICT, the physical sciences — were disproportionately the fields attracting the largest increases in research funding globally. As computing, artificial intelligence research, and advanced materials science captured increasing shares of national research budgets, the fields where women were scarce were exactly the fields that were growing fastest. This meant that even with slow overall improvement in women's researcher share, the distribution of women's research work could be shifting toward fields with lower social and economic impact.
The Bridge to the Current Site
This analysis is, in one sense, the last article in WIGSAT's historical archive — the most recent date in the backfill that connects this site's NGO-era documentation of women-in-global-science to its current identity as a directory and editorial resource for women in STEM programs, scholarships, and research opportunities. The questions that GASAT conferences were asking in 2007 — how to address structural barriers to women's research careers, how to ensure that international science funding reaches women researchers in developing nations, how to make the institutions of science less resistant to women's full participation — were still being asked in 2024.
The answers available in 2024 were better than they were in 2007. The evidence base for what works was more robust. The international infrastructure for women's STEM participation — fellowships, networks, accountability programmes — was larger and more developed. The institutions of science had changed, in most countries, in the direction of greater equity, even if the pace of change remained slower than the evidence warranted.
The question that the UNESCO 2024 report implicitly posed — whether the current pace of improvement was sufficient to produce meaningful change in women's research participation within a time horizon that mattered — did not have a comfortable answer. Structural change in institutions was slow. The evidence for accelerating it was clear. The political and institutional will to apply that evidence remained uneven across countries and regions. That gap — between what we know would work and what is actually being done — was the animating tension of the women-in-science policy conversation in 2024, as it had been for the preceding three decades.
Frequently Asked Questions
What did the UNESCO 2024 Women in Science report find globally?
Women represented approximately 33-34 percent of the world's researchers in the 2024 data — an improvement from approximately 29 percent a decade earlier, but still well below parity and improving at a rate of roughly half a percentage point per year in aggregate.
Which world region has the highest and lowest women's research participation?
Latin America and the Caribbean had the highest regional aggregate, at approximately 47 percent women researchers. South and West Asia had the lowest, at approximately 20-22 percent. Sub-Saharan Africa was close to the global average at approximately 33 percent, with substantial variation within the region.
In which STEM fields are women researchers most and least represented globally?
Most represented: biological sciences, health sciences, and chemistry. Least represented: engineering, ICT, and physical sciences. The under-representation in engineering and ICT was particularly concerning because these fields were attracting the fastest-growing shares of research funding globally.
What is the significance of this article as the most recent in WIGSAT's archive?
This article bridges the site's historical documentation of women-in-global-science — rooted in the GASAT conference era and WIGSAT's original NGO identity — to the current site identity as a directory and editorial resource. The structural questions raised at GASAT 11 in 2007 were still present in the UNESCO 2024 data, which is both a record of how persistent structural inequality is and a reminder of why the advocacy and documentation work matters.
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