Below a short extract of the recent paper "Gender differences in performance of top cited scientists by field and country" published in the journal Scientometrics:
"To measure gender differences amongst the very successful scholars in science, we employ the database made publicly available by Ioannidis et al. (2019), which encompasses information on the 105,026 highest ranked scientists from almost two hundred fields in terms of a composite citation indicator that considers six career-citation metrics (excluding self-citations)...
...The ten countries with the highest shares of women among their top authors are Finland (20.45%), Portugal (18.81%), New Zealand (18.32%), Slovenia (18.18%), South Africa (18.04%), Australia (17.83%), the US (17.43%), the UK (17.12%), Canada (16.80%), and France (16.75%)..." https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-020-03733-w
The aforementioned database that was created by Stanford Professor John Ioannidis team is available in the link below. Note that It´s a large file which takes several minutes to download:
