The research, from QUT’s School of Public Health and Social Work, looked at 95 women selected randomly from a range of Australian STEM fields, and looked at their annual publication and citation counts, which are used as key benchmarks for researchers looking to secure future funding.

Lead author Professor Adrian Barnett said the results were “complex”.

“If you’re comparing researchers, you can come up with their raw numbers within hours and then rank them, but that has very little correlation with their actual value to society.

“So it is a very difficult problem but there is no simple shortcut through it.”

One of the measures the paper suggests is to move away from the “publish or perish” mantra that drives science academia — where future funding grants are based on a steady stream of previous work.

Professor Barnett said that can put women who take time off from research to have a family at a specific disadvantage.

“When it comes to funding, it’s scientists judging other scientists and often being quite hard on each other,” he said.

“If you measure people based on numbers, numbers is what they’ll produce, and research really should not be a numbers game, it should be a quality game.

Currently, funding bodies usually include a section on grant applications where people can outline factors that explain why they might not have published anything recently, including taking time off to have children.

Professor Barnett said Australia’s two main funding bodies, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and the Australian Research Council (ARC), were taking steps in the right direction but were still arguably giving too much weight to research quantity rather than quality.

In an illustration of how widespread the issue was,  paper co-author Lauren Sewell had to take time off from research herself to look after her own children after it was complete.

Ms Sewell said one of the main ways women fell behind men in STEM fields was networking, with many women hamstrung by the need to find childcare so they could attend conferences and other networking events.

“You could try to put events at more appropriate times — a lot of events are immediately after work, which is probably the hardest time to make them for many women,” Ms Sewell said.

“Also, potentially subsidising childcare if it’s required so women can make these events, especially if there’s not a partner involved.”

Kylie Walker, CEO of science advocacy group Science & Technology Australia, said the move away from relentless publishing to more family-friendly arrangements for research would benefit both men and women.

“An important part of the equation is to start to create the cultural expectation and the structural expectation that fathers and non-birth-mothers are also participating in childcare,” Ms Walker said.

The federal government recently allocated $1.8 million towards the Science in Australia Gender Equity program, while the Queensland government recently awarded its latest round of Women in STEM awards, which include $5000 in prize money for professional development.

The paper has been published in the journal Plos One.