Gender gap and women's leadership in finance research: analysing the last decade (2014-2023)

Purpose ‒ The paper aims to investigate the evolution of women's participation in financial research over the last decade. To this end, the research moves on threefold streams: (1) female authorship of scientific articles on finance, (2) the gender gap in authorship and (3) female participation in articles in more impactful articles. Methodology ‒ The research is supported by the quantitative methodology of bibliometrics analysis. We used a unique dataset of 10,457 academic articles published in 250 scientific journals by 26,858 (co)authors. The data were obtained from Clarivate Analytics' Web of Science Core Collection database. Subsequently, the gender of the 26,858 (co)authors was determined to determine the role of women in financial research. Findings ‒ The findings show that over the last decade female authors in finance articles averaged around 22%. However, at the beginning of the period (2014) women accounted for 20.1% of (co)authors, while at the end of the period (2023) their representation has reached 26.7%. Consequently, this has reduced the gender gap from 59.8% to 46.5%. Despite the evidence of the gender gap during the sample period (2014-2023), we also found that the situation of women in academia is improving. These results are still far from gender balance (40:60%) or gender parity (50%:50%), thus showing an under- representation (<40%) of female authorship in finance research. Originality ‒ This study contributes to gender studies and financial literature, as well as supporting the gender equality debate linked to SDGs 5 (Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls) and SDGs 10 (Reduce inequality within and among countries). Our study, unlike previous works, does not limit the analysis to one type of journal (e.g., leading journals), to a reduced period (usually less than 10 years) or to a specific country (usually the USA), but proposes a broader approach by considering articles published on finance in international academic journals during the last decade. Limitations ‒ The main limitation of this paper it could be recognized in the use of binomial variable for determining gender (female vs. male) with the objective to restrict the focus of the analysis, given the scarcity in the availability of data on the gender variable. Future perspectives ‒ Future lines of work could advance towards the inclusion of non- binary gender in the analysis of gender authorship in this field, although this would require recognizing the need to use smaller samples given the difficulty involved.