Does female-authored research have more educational impact than male-authored research?

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Levy Library Press in Journal of Altmetrics on 04/10/2018, available online: http://doi.org/10.29024/joa.2 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Female academics are more likely to be in teaching-related roles in some countries, including the USA. As a side effect of this, female-authored journal articles may tend to be more useful for students. This study assesses this hypothesis by investigating whether female first-authored research has more uptake in education than male first-authored research. Based on an analysis of Mendeley readers of articles from 2014 in five countries and 100 narrow Scopus subject categories, the results show that female-authored articles attract more student readers than male-authored articles in Spain, Turkey, the UK and USA but not India. They also attract fewer professorial readers in Spain, the UK and the USA, but not India and Turkey, and tend to be less popular with senior academics. Because the results are based on analysis of differences within narrow fields they cannot be accounted for by females working in more education-related disciplines. The apparent additional educational impact for female-authored research could be due to selecting more accessible micro-specialisms, however, such as health-related instruments within the instrumentation narrow field. Whatever the cause, the results suggest that citation-based research evaluations may undervalue the wider impact of female researchers

Gender and research Publishing in India: Uniformly high inequality?

Gender inequalities have been a persistent feature of all modern societies. Although employment-related gender discrimination in various forms is legally prohibited, prejudice and violence against females have not been eradicated. Moreover, gendered social expectations can constrain the career choices of both males and females. Within academia, continuing gender imbalances have been found in many countries (Larivière, Ni, Gingras, Cronin, & Sugimoto, 2013), and particularly at senior levels (e.g., Ucal, O'Neil, & Toktas, 2015; Weisshaar, 2017; Winchester & Browning, 2015). India was the fifth largest research producer in 2017, according to Scopus, but has the highest United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) gender inequality index of the 30 largest research producers in Scopus (/hdr.undp.org/en/data) and so is an important case for global science. Moreover, the complex web of influences that have led to women being underrepresented in science in India is not well understood (Gupta, 2015). The absence of basic information about gender inequalities is a serious limitation because gender issues in India differ from the better researched case of the USA, due to economic conditions, probably stronger family influences (Vindhya, 2007), greater female safety concerns (Vindhya, 2007), and differing cultural expectations (Chandrakar, 2014)