A new study of COVID-19–era publication patterns by gender contradicts earlier research on the topic, suggesting that women haven’t published less than they did prior to the pandemic, over all.

What the study calls gender inequality has grown in some fields during this period of increased caregiving demands and quarantine, however—in psychology, math and philosophy, specifically.

“Our results do not offer a complete picture,” says the study, published in the Journal of Information Science. Yet the results “clearly indicate that COVID-19 bias in gender publication patterns is not clear[;] the picture is complicated, and calls for further studies.”

The idea was to compare publication rates by gender in each of those three years, looking for major discrepancies between 2019, entirely before the pandemic, and after. Contrary to numerous other studies with different methodologies and different data sets showing that women have fallen behind men in terms of publishing since early 2020, this study found no significant differences between the three years.

That’s overall. There were significant differences in certain disciplines, however. The biggest decrease in proportion of women authors was in psychology (down 74.4 percent between 2019 and January 2021 and down 12.3 percent between 2020 and January 2021). The second-biggest drop was in math (down 12.9 percent and 17.5 percent, respectively), followed by philosophy (down 11.3 percent and 10.3 percent, respectively).

Jemielniak said one practical policy implication “could be to be very careful with regard to tenure review process changes. My gut feeling—not research based—is that there likely was a significant bias, but it was granular. For instance, I would not be surprised at all if it turned out that while women scholars have not been as affected, mothers of young children were, very disproportionately, even to fathers of young children.”

Considering journal articles in 2019, 2020 and January 2021 isn’t “enough to time see an actual COVID-related pattern,” she said. “In many disciplines, an article that gets submitted at Time X and is ultimately accepted for publication may not see print for up to two years.” In political science, for instance, she continued, one full year from submission to publication would be considered “fast.”