We studied papers in which two or more authors shared the first author position: ‘fm’, ‘ff’, ‘mf’ and ‘mm’ represent papers in which two authors shared the first author position, with the actual order of the authors being female-male, female-female, male-female and male-male. For papers in which more than two authors shared the first author position, ‘all f’ means that all these authors were female, ‘all m’ means they were all male, and ‘f+’ or 'm+' means that the first author listed in a mixed-gender combination was female or male respectively. The plot shows that the proportion of combinations in which a male author is listed first (various shades of blue) is decreasing over time.
Figure 1—source data 1. Raw data for Figure 1.Excel database of the papers examined in this study. Grey shaded rows indicate the papers excluded from analysis when gender identification was not able to be determined.