  Current attempts to address the shortfall of female researchers in Science,
Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) have not yet succeeded despite
other academic subjects having female majorities. This article investigates the
extent to which gender disparities are subject-wide or nation-specific by a
first author gender comparison of 30 million articles from all 27 Scopus broad
fields within the 31 countries with the most Scopus-indexed articles 2014-18.
The results show overall and geocultural patterns as well as individual
national differences. Almost half of the subjects were always more male (7;
e.g., Mathematics) or always more female (6; e.g., Immunology & Microbiology)
than the national average. A strong overall trend (Spearman correlation 0.546)
is for countries with a higher proportion of female first-authored research to
also have larger differences in gender disparities between fields (correlation
0.314 for gender ratios). This confirms the international gender equality
paradox previously found for degree subject choices: increased gender equality
overall associates with moderately greater gender differentiation between
subjects. This is consistent with previous USA-based claims that gender
differences in academic careers are partly due to (socially constrained) gender
differences in personal preferences. Radical solutions may therefore be needed
for some STEM subjects to overcome gender disparities.
