Although the percentage of female authors is still less than women's overall representation within the full-time faculty ranks, researchers found that the proportion has increased as more women have entered the professoriate. They also found that women cluster into certain subfields and are somewhat underrepresented in the prestigious position of first author. In the biological sciences, women are even more underrepresented as last author. The last name on a scientific article is typically that of the senior scholar, who is not necessarily responsible for doing most of the research or writing but who directs the lab where the experiment was based. Scholarly publishing, more than anything else, is the measuring stick of professors' research productivity. In the humanities, it is usually the monograph. But in the hard sciences and in many social sciences, it is journal articles. To be hired on the tenure track in those fields by a top research university, young scholars increasingly must have publications on their CVs by the time they finish their doctoral degrees. And once they are hired, more publications in leading journals typically are required to be promoted at every step along the way to full professor. Women's progress in academe has long been a hot topic, not least the debate over why women publish less than men do. Female professors are more likely to emphasize quality over quantity, some scholars argue, turning out fewer but meatier pieces than do their male colleagues, who are more apt to increase their productivity by publishing their work in more-frequent chunks. In addition, studies show that women spend less time on research and more time on teaching and committee work. And it is often research and publishing, which require sustained attention, that suffer when women devote time to caring for young children. As more women earn Ph.D.s and take faculty jobs, though, and as the gap between the number of women and men in academe narrows, scholars have begun thinking about whether anything can or should be done about gender-based differences that remain in publishing, hiring, promotion, and pay. Do those differences result from choices women make, scholars wonder, or from discrimination?