This paper presents the dynamics of gender inequalities at Polish universities in the years 2004–2021. Instead of the usual shares of women among all university graduates and employees, I analyse the degrees and titles awarded in this period. The gender imbalance among university graduates persists, with women obtaining twice as many master's degrees as men. Among the new doctors, a small surplus of women appeared. The shares of women in habilitations and titles of professors substantially increased. The shares of women in engineering and technical sciences increased at all levels. Both among graduates and among scientists, the gender composition tends towards equality where women have been less numerous so far. However, a similar trend has not occurred where men obtained a minority of degrees and titles.

This article offers a survey of the careers of 54 Polish female historians who received the habilitacja degree in 1945–1989 at seven Polish universities – four of those were founded soon after the Second World War (University of Łódź, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, University of Wrocław, Maria Skłodowska‑Curie University in Lublin), while three had been established earlier (University of Warsaw, Jagiellonian University in Kraków and the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań). Analysis of personal files and various biographical materials has led the author to a number of conclusions about female historians’ academic careers. The careers reflected the discipline’s development, both in terms of the expansion of its field of inquiry, as well its methodological diversity and the conditions in which it operated. Career paths followed by women were not much different from those followed by men. Neither advancement requirements, nor employment policy at the schools of higher learning were discriminatory towards any of the sexes. However, as far as the female career advancement is concerned, there were some differences between the old and new universities: it was easier for women to obtain managerial positions at the latter.

Lifetime biographical and publication histories of 2,326 full professors were examined. A combination of administrative, biographical, and bibliometric data was used. Retrospectively constructed productivity, promotion age and speed classes were examined. About 50% of current top productive professors have been top productive throughout their academic careers, over 30–40 years. Topto- bottom and bottom-to-top transitions in productivity classes over academic careers are very rare. We used prestige-normalized productivity in which more weight is given to articles in high-impact than in low-impact journals, recognizing the highly stratified nature of academic science. The combination of biographical and demographic data with raw Scopus publication data from the past 50 years (N = 935,167 articles) made it possible to assign all full professors retrospectively to different productivity, promotion age, and promotion speed classes. In logistic regression models, there were two powerful predictors of belonging to the Top productivity class for full professors: being highly productive as associate professor and as assistant professor (increasing the odds by 180% and 360%). Neither gender nor age (biological or academic) emerged as statistically significant. Our findings have important implications for hiring policies as scientists stay in Polish academia usually for several decades.

We examined the male-female collaboration practices of all internationally visible Polish university professors (N = 25,463) based on their Scopus-indexed publications from 2009–2018 (158,743 journal articles). We merged a national registry of 99,935 scientists with the Scopus publication database, using probabilistic and deterministic record linkage. Our database (“The Polish Science Observatory”) included all professors with at least a doctoral degree employed in 85 researchinvolved universities. We determined an “individual publication portfolio” for every professor. The gender homophily principle (publishing predominantly with scientists of the same sex) was found to apply to male scientists — but not to females. The majority of male scientists collaborate solely with males; most female scientists, in contrast, do not collaborate with females at all. Gender homophily in research-intensive institutions proved stronger for males than for females. Finally, we used a multi-dimensional fractional logit regression model to estimate the impact of gender and other individual-level and institutional-level independent variables on gender homophily in research collaboration.

In this paper we analyze the phenomenon of quitting academic science and show how quitting differs between men and women, academic disciplines and over time. The approach presented is comprehensive: global, based on cohorts of scientists, and longitudinal – we observe the publication activity of individual scientists over time. Using metadata from Scopus, a global bibliometric database of publications and citations, we analyze the publication careers of scientists from 38 OECD countries who began publishing in 2000 ( N = 142 776) and 2010 ( N = 232 843). The paper tests the usefulness of large bibliometric datasets for a global analysis of academic careers.