Sex differences in people and things orientation are reflected in sex differences in academic publishing

Sex differences in people and things orientation have been reported in a range of psychobehavioural domains. Females, on average, score higher than males on people orientation, while males, on average, score higher than females on things orientation. In this article, I reanalyse recent data on sex differences in academic publishing using Scopus journal articles from 2017 (n = 27,710 articles in India; n = 285,619 articles in the US). The results show that in both India (r(s) =-.71) and the United States (r(s) =-.69), women were more prevalent as the first authors of articles in more people-oriented fields than in fields that were more things-oriented, which had a high proportion of male first authors. The findings indicate that there are similar cross-national patterns between US and India in field-specific female-to-male author ratios when factoring in the people and things orientation of those fields. Where the people and things dimension fails to explain sex differences in academic publishing, sex differences in the empathising-systemising quotients may explain residual variation in sex differences in research subject choices. The findings reported here extend existing psychobehavioural, developmental, and evolutionary research on sex differences in interests and cognitive styles. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.