  Although the gender gap in academia has narrowed, females are
underrepresented within some fields in the USA. Prior research suggests that
the imbalances between science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields
may be partly due to greater male interest in things and greater female
interest in people, or to off-putting masculine cultures in some disciplines.
To seek more detailed insights across all subjects, this article compares
practising US male and female researchers between and within 285 narrow Scopus
fields inside 26 broad fields from their first-authored articles published in
2017. The comparison is based on publishing fields and the words used in
article titles, abstracts, and keywords. The results cannot be fully explained
by the people/thing dimensions. Exceptions include greater female interest in
veterinary science and cell biology and greater male interest in abstraction,
patients, and power/control fields, such as politics and law. These may be due
to other factors, such as the ability of a career to provide status or social
impact or the availability of alternative careers. As a possible side effect of
the partial people/thing relationship, females are more likely to use
exploratory and qualitative methods and males are more likely to use
quantitative methods. The results suggest that the necessary steps of
eliminating explicit and implicit gender bias in academia are insufficient and
might be complemented by measures to make fields more attractive to minority
genders.
