Gender disparity in Polish science by year (1975-2014) and by discipline

The production and impact of male and female authors in Poland over the period 1975-2014 have been studied. The method is based on a special property of Polish last names, namely several popular last names have separate masculine (-ski, -cki) and feminine (-ska, -cka) forms. In this respect Polish is different from most other languages, in which the last name has only one form independent of the gender. A set of 56 634 unique publications of authors bearing one of 26 most popular -ski or -cki names was analyzed. The male dominance was observed over the entire studied period, yet it became systematically less significant over the period 1995-2014, especially in terms of production.