Workforce data was assembled from a range of sources. We looked for evidence of women’s representation in the disciplines of political science, sociology, philosophy, history and economics and across national sources in Australia, Canada, UK and USA.

There are many limitations to our approach. Comparing data is complicated by the different methodologies used to obtain the original figures, as well as the varying categories used to count staff and the time periods covered. The ranking of staff is not fully commensurate, with differing systems of promotion and tenure between countries. We found that within countries there was a variation in data collected by professional associations and the data collected by government agencies: we have included data from both sources where it is relevant.

Our aim has been to chart indicative pictures of disciplines and their differences rather than provide completely adequate quantification of workforces. We work with a gender binary that reflects the majority of data-collection approaches, while recognising the problems with this categorisation. Although some of these sources have very recently begun to include data on non-binary identified researchers, we have not tracked that data here. The inadequacies of binary gender identification in such research are important to admit: we acknowledge that counting ‘women’ may not capture all people who identify as such, and that labelling ‘non-women’ in the figures as ‘men’ similarly fails to capture a range of gender identities. We also note that other intersectionally important data is rarely collected, such as Indigenous status, culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) status and disability status.

The data is nonetheless very helpful in establishing a broad and indicative picture of differences between our five disciplines. As anticipated in our research we find significant variation between rates of women’s representation, with economics and philosophy the worst performing internationally. Political science fares somewhat better and like economics and philosophy has a consistent international profile. History seems to be doing well at achieving gender parity in some parts of the world (Australia) but less well elsewhere (UK). Sociology has been the most problematic discipline for us to collect data on, but we infer that this is because it is widely perceived not to have significant gender imbalances, meaning that data is not being collected and monitored by national associations. The data we do have on sociology indicates that it has the highest representation of women among our disciplines.

Further details on the academic workforce in four countries

• Australia
• Canada
• United Kingdom
• United States