Fig. 2

Evolution of the cumulative degree distributions in the INFORMS network suggests that women are disproportionately underrepresented among authors with many publications. Plots display the normalized cumulative author degree distribution for the indicated year, i.e., the vertical axis is the fraction of authors of this gender with at least that number of publications. Since there are more men than women in the network, the degree distribution for men is expected to extend to more publications than that for women. However, the steeper slope of the distribution for women (in log scale) suggests their systematic underrepresentation, especially in the high-publication tail of the distribution (quantified in Fig. 3). See Additional file 1 for a video of the cumulative degree distributions over time