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
