979 research outputs found
Gender Disparities in Science? Dropout, Productivity, Collaborations and Success of Male and Female Computer Scientists
Scientific collaborations shape ideas as well as innovations and are both the
substrate for, and the outcome of, academic careers. Recent studies show that
gender inequality is still present in many scientific practices ranging from
hiring to peer-review processes and grant applications. In this work, we
investigate gender-specific differences in collaboration patterns of more than
one million computer scientists over the course of 47 years. We explore how
these patterns change over years and career ages and how they impact scientific
success. Our results highlight that successful male and female scientists
reveal the same collaboration patterns: compared to scientists in the same
career age, they tend to collaborate with more colleagues than other
scientists, seek innovations as brokers and establish longer-lasting and more
repetitive collaborations. However, women are on average less likely to adapt
the collaboration patterns that are related with success, more likely to embed
into ego networks devoid of structural holes, and they exhibit stronger gender
homophily as well as a consistently higher dropout rate than men in all career
ages
The Effect of Gender in the Publication Patterns in Mathematics
Despite the increasing number of women graduating in mathematics, a systemic
gender imbalance persists and is signified by a pronounced gender gap in the
distribution of active researchers and professors. Especially at the level of
university faculty, women mathematicians continue being drastically
underrepresented, decades after the first affirmative action measures have been
put into place. A solid publication record is of paramount importance for
securing permanent positions. Thus, the question arises whether the publication
patterns of men and women mathematicians differ in a significant way. Making
use of the zbMATH database, one of the most comprehensive metadata sources on
mathematical publications, we analyze the scholarly output of ~150,000
mathematicians from the past four decades whose gender we algorithmically
inferred. We focus on development over time, collaboration through
coautorships, presumed journal quality and distribution of research topics --
factors known to have a strong impact on job perspectives. We report
significant differences between genders which may put women at a disadvantage
when pursuing an academic career in mathematics.Comment: 24 pages, 12 figure
Individual and gender inequality in computer science: a career study of cohorts from 1970 to 2000
Inequality prevails in science. Individual inequality means that most perish quickly and only a few are successful, while gender inequality implies that there are differences in achievements for women and men. Using large-scale bibliographic data and following a computational approach, we study the evolution of individual and gender inequality for cohorts from 1970 to 2000 in the whole field of computer science as it grows and becomes a team-based science. We find that individual inequality in productivity (publications) increases over a scholar’s career but is historically invariant, while individual inequality in impact (citations), albeit larger, is stable across cohorts and careers. Gender inequality prevails regarding productivity, but there is no evidence for differences in impact. The Matthew Effect is shown to accumulate advantages to early achievements and to become stronger over the decades, indicating the rise of a “publish or perish” imperative. Only some authors manage to reap the benefits that publishing in teams promises. The Matthew Effect then amplifies initial differences and propagates the gender gap. Women continue to fall behind because they continue to be at a higher risk of dropping out for reasons that have nothing to do with early-career achievements or social support. Our findings suggest that mentoring programs for women to improve their social-networking skills can help to reduce gender inequality
Historical comparison of gender inequality in scientific careers across countries and disciplines
There is extensive, yet fragmented, evidence of gender differences in
academia suggesting that women are under-represented in most scientific
disciplines, publish fewer articles throughout a career, and their work
acquires fewer citations. Here, we offer a comprehensive picture of
longitudinal gender discrepancies in performance through a bibliometric
analysis of academic careers by reconstructing the complete publication history
of over 1.5 million gender-identified authors whose publishing career ended
between 1955 and 2010, covering 83 countries and 13 disciplines. We find that,
paradoxically, the increase of participation of women in science over the past
60 years was accompanied by an increase of gender differences in both
productivity and impact. Most surprisingly though, we uncover two gender
invariants, finding that men and women publish at a comparable annual rate and
have equivalent career-wise impact for the same size body of work. Finally, we
demonstrate that differences in dropout rates and career length explain a large
portion of the reported career-wise differences in productivity and impact.
This comprehensive picture of gender inequality in academia can help rephrase
the conversation around the sustainability of women's careers in academia, with
important consequences for institutions and policy makers.Comment: 23 pages, 4 figures, and S
Gender-Based Homophily in Research: A Large-Scale Study of Man-Woman Collaboration
We examined the male-female collaboration practices of all internationally
visible Polish university professors (N = 25,463) based on their Scopus-indexed
publications from 2009-2018 (158,743 journal articles). We merged a national
registry of 99,935 scientists (with full administrative and biographical data)
with the Scopus publication database, using probabilistic and deterministic
record linkage. Our unique biographical, administrative, publication, and
citation database (The Observatory of Polish Science) included all professors
with at least a doctoral degree employed in 85 research-involved universities.
We determined what we term an individual publication portfolio for every
professor, and we examined the respective impacts of biological age, academic
position, academic discipline, average journal prestige, and type of
institution on the same-sex collaboration ratio. The gender homophily principle
(publishing predominantly with scientists of the same sex) was found to apply
to male scientists - but not to females. The majority of male scientists
collaborate solely with males; most female scientists, in contrast, do not
collaborate with females at all. Across all age groups studied, all-female
collaboration is marginal, while all-male collaboration is pervasive. Gender
homophily in research-intensive institutions proved stronger for males than for
females. Finally, we used a multi-dimensional fractional logit regression model
to estimate the impact of gender and other individual-level and
institutional-level independent variables on gender homophily in research
collaboration.Comment: 46 pages, 15 tables, 8 figure
Gender Inequalities: Women Researchers Require More Knowledge in Specific and Experimental Topics
Gender inequalities in science have long been observed globally. Studies have
demonstrated it through survey data or published literature, focusing on the
interests of subjects or authors; few, however, examined the manifestation of
gender inequalities on researchers' knowledge status. This study analyzes the
relationship between regional and gender identities, topics, and knowledge
status while revealing the female labor division in science and scientific
research using online Q&A from researchers. We find that gender inequalities
are merged with both regional-specific characteristics and global common
patterns. Women's field and topic distribution within fields are influenced by
regions, yet the prevalent topics are consistent in all regions. Women are more
involved in specific topics, particularly topics about experiments with weaker
levels of knowledge and they are of less assistance. To promote inequality in
science, the scientific community should pay more attention to reducing the
knowledge gap and encourage women to work on unexplored topics and areas
Researchers collaborate with same-gendered colleagues more often than expected across the life sciences
Evidence suggests that women in academia are hindered by conscious and unconscious biases, and often feel excluded from formal and informal opportunities for research collaboration. In addition to ensuring fairness and helping to redress gender imbalance in the academic workforce, increasing women's access to collaboration could help scientific progress by drawing on more of the available human capital. Here, we test whether researchers tend to collaborate with same-gendered colleagues, using more stringent methods and a larger dataset than in past work. Our results reaffirm that researchers co-publish with colleagues of the same gender more often than expected by chance, and show that this 'gender homophily' is slightly stronger today than it was 10 years ago. Contrary to our expectations, we found no evidence that homophily is driven mostly by senior academics, and no evidence that homophily is stronger in fields where women are in the minority. Interestingly, journals with a high impact factor for their discipline tended to have comparatively low homophily, as predicted if mixed-gender teams produce better research. We discuss some potential causes of gender homophily in science.Peer reviewe
Are female scientists less inclined to publish alone? The gender solo research gap
In solo research, scientists compete individually for prestige, sending clear signals about their research ability, avoiding problems in credit allocation, and reducing conflicts about authorship. We examine to what extent male and female scientists differ in their use of solo publishing across various dimensions. This research is the first to comprehensively study the “gender solo research gap” among all internationally visible scientists within a whole national higher education system. We examine the gap through mean “individual solo publishing rates” found in “individual publication portfolios” constructed for each Polish university professor. We use the practical significance/statistical significance difference (based on the effect-size r coefficient) and our analyses indicate that while some gender differences are statistically significant, they have no practical significance. Using a partial effects of fractional logistic regression approach, we estimate the probability of conducting solo research. In none of the models does gender explain the variability of the individual solo publishing rate. The strongest predictor of individual solo publishing rate is the average team size, publishing in STEM fields negatively affects the rate, publishing in male-dominated disciplines positively affects it, and the influence of international collaboration is negative. The gender solo research gap in Poland is much weaker than expected: within a more general trend toward team research and international research, gender differences in solo research are much weaker and less relevant than initially assumed. We use our unique biographical, administrative, publication, and citation database (“Polish Science Observatory”) with metadata on all Polish scientists present in Scopus (N = 25,463) and their 158,743 Scopus-indexed articles published in 2009–2018, including 18,900 solo articles
Ph.D. research output in STEM: the role of gender and race in supervision
We study whether student-advisor gender and race couples matter for publication productivity of Ph.D. students in South Africa. We consider the sample of all Ph.D.s in STEM graduating between 2000 and 2014, after the recent systematic introduction of doctoral programs in this country. We investigate the joint effects of gender and race for the whole sample and looking separately at the sub-samples of (1) whitewhite; (2) black-black; and (3) black-white student-advisor couples. We find early career productivity differences: while female students publish on average 10% to 20% fewer articles than males, this is true mainly for female students working with a male advisor, not for those working with a female one. These disparities are similar, though more pronounced, when looking at the joint effects of gender and race for the white-white and black-black student-advisor pairs. We also explore whether publication productivity differences change significantly for students with a high, medium, or low “productivity-profile”, and find that they are U-shaped. Female students with a high (or low) “productivity-profile” studying with female advisors are as productive than male students with a high (or low) “productivity-profile” studying with male advisor
Collaboration enhances career progression in academic science, especially for female researchers.
Funder: Helsinki Institute of Life ScienceFunder: Leverhulme TrustCollaboration and diversity are increasingly promoted in science. Yet how collaborations influence academic career progression, and whether this differs by gender, remains largely unknown. Here, we use co-authorship ego networks to quantify collaboration behaviour and career progression of a cohort of contributors to biennial International Society of Behavioral Ecology meetings (1992, 1994, 1996). Among this cohort, women were slower and less likely to become a principal investigator (PI; approximated by having at least three last-author publications) and published fewer papers over fewer years (i.e. had shorter academic careers) than men. After adjusting for publication number, women also had fewer collaborators (lower adjusted network size) and published fewer times with each co-author (lower adjusted tie strength), albeit more often with the same group of collaborators (higher adjusted clustering coefficient). Authors with stronger networks were more likely to become a PI, and those with less clustered networks did so more quickly. Women, however, showed a stronger positive relationship with adjusted network size (increased career length) and adjusted tie strength (increased likelihood to become a PI). Finally, early-career network characteristics correlated with career length. Our results suggest that large and varied collaboration networks are positively correlated with career progression, especially for women
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