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As a physicist and data scientist with a keen interest in gender inequality, Fariba Karimi was amazed to discover that the gender gap in physics has remained almost unchanged since 1900. As the citation and coauthorship networks in physics expand, women still make up a small proportion—and the gaps between male and female are getting larger in terms of absolute numbers.

"With roughly the same number of men and women in the world, we should expect this gap to close in an equal society. But what we see in reality is a persistent gap in physics over time," says Karimi, from the Complexity Science Hub.

"This gap was puzzling me. Why is this happening and when will this gap close?," adds Karimi, also a professor at Graz University of Technology. Together with computer scientist Jun Sun, from the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Karimi decided to investigate why these inequities persist.

In a paper, titled "Emergence of group size disparity in growing networks with adoption," published in Communications Physics, Karimi and Sun introduce a model that combines two key mechanisms—generalized preferential attachment and asymmetric mixing—to explain the enduring disparities observed in academic networks.

First, a look at real-world dynamics

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