PUBBLICAZIONE/PUBLICATION

Permanent URI for this communityhttps://gendermore.unimore.it/handle/123456789/1575

Browse

Settings

Discipline: search.filters.discipline.PhysicsViewpoints: search.filters.viewpoints.Global

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
  • Item type:Publication,
    A gender equality paradox in academic publishing: Countries with a higher proportion of female first-authored journal articles have larger first-author gender disparities between fields Open PDF 
    (2020)
    Thelwall, M.
    ;
    Mas-Bleda, A.
    Current attempts to address the shortfall of female researchers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) have not yet succeeded, despite other academic subjects having female majorities. This article investigates the extent to which gender disparities are subject-wide or nation-specific by a first-author gender comparison of 30 million articles from all 27 Scopus broad fields within the 31 countries with the most Scopus-indexed articles 2014–2018. The results show overall and geocultural patterns as well as individual national differences. Almost half of the subjects were always more male (seven; e.g., Mathematics) or always more female (six; e.g., Immunology & Microbiology) than the national average. A strong overall trend (Spearman correlation 0.546) is for countries with a higher proportion of female first-authored research to also have larger differences in gender disparities between fields (correlation 0.314 for gender ratios). This confirms the international gender equality paradox previously found for degree subject choices: Increased gender equality overall associates with moderately greater gender differentiation between subjects. This is consistent with previous United States-based claims that gender differences in academic careers are partly due to (socially constrained) gender differences in personal preferences. Radical solutions may therefore be needed for some STEM subjects to overcome gender disparities. © 2020 Mike Thelwall and Amalia Mas-Bleda. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.
  • Item type:Publication,
    Gender issues in fundamental physics: A bibliometric analysis Open PDF 
    (2021)
    Strumia, A.
    I analyze bibliometric data about fundamental physics worldwide from 1970 to now, extracting quantitative data about gender issues. I do not find significant gender differences in hiring rates, hiring timing, career gaps and slowdowns, abandonment rates, citation, and self-citation patterns. Furthermore, various bibliometric indicators (number of fractionally counted papers, citations, etc.) exhibit a productivity gap at hiring moments, at career level, and without integrating over careers. The gap persists after accounting for confounding factors and manifests as an increasing fraction of male authors going from average to top authors in terms of bibliometric indices, with a quantitative shape that can be fitted by higher male variability. © 2021 Alessandro Strumia. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.
  • Item type:Publication,
    Who acknowledges who? A gender analysis
    (2019)
    Paul-Hus, A.
    ;
    Mongeon, P.
    ;
    Sainte-Marie, M.
    ;
    Larivière, V.
    Acknowledgements found in scholarly papers allow for credit attribution among non-authors—from individuals to organizations—that contributed to a piece of research. As such, they are associated with a different kind of recognition than authorship. While several studies have shown that social factors affect authorship and citation practices, few analyses have been performed on acknowledgements. Based on 878,250 acknowledgees mentioned in 291,167 papers published in 2015 retrieved from Web of Science, the objective of this work-in-progress is to better understand such credit attribution practices and how gender may influence them. Our results show that gender disparities generally found in authorship can be extended to acknowledgements, and that women are even more underrepresented in the acknowledgement than in the authors’ list of a paper. Our findings also confirm that women acknowledge proportionally more women. These results suggest that gender plays a role in the entire spectrum of credit attribution practices, from authorships to acknowledgements.
  • Item type:Publication,
    Gender differences in performance of top cited scientists by field and country Open PDF 
    (2020)
    Chan, H.F.
    ;
    Torgler, B.
    In this descriptive study, we aim to show the potential gender differences in academic success, focusing on the top (i.e., most frequently cited) scientists by analyzing the work of more than 94,000 scientists in 21 fields across 43 countries. Our results indicate that female representation in the top tier of scientists strongly varies between countries (11.83%; s.d. = 0.046), with the highest proportion of top women scientists in Finland (20.45%) and the lowest in Saudi Arabia (2.08%). Compared with the total share of females in science, women are underrepresented among the top (i.e., most frequently cited) scholars by 28.52 percentage points. The proportions differ by disciplines, with top women authors best represented in Public Health and Services (36.1%), Communication and Textual Studies (33.7%), Psychology and Cognitive Science (27.5%), and Social Sciences (23%); while the lowest share of women scientists are found in Mathematics and Statistics (6.3%), Engineering (7.2%), and Physics and Astronomy (7.7%). However, despite the low female representation, top women scholars in those three fields conduct (on average) more impactful research than their male colleagues, which is contrary to most other research fields. We also show that female scientific success is positively correlated with a nation’s higher gender equity indicators, lower discriminatory values, and less negative attitudes and preferences towards women. Overall, our findings suggest that scientific fields are still struggling with gender inequality that pervades public life. © 2020, Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary.
  • Item type:Publication,
    Gender issues in fundamental physics: Strumia’s bibliometric analysis fails to account for key confounders and confuses correlation with causation Open PDF 
    (2021)
    Ball, Philip
    ;
    Britton, T. Benjamin
    ;
    Hengel, Erin
    ;
    Moriarty, Philip
    ;
    Oliver, Rachel A.
    Alessandro Strumia recently published a survey of gender differences in publications and citations in high-energy physics (HEP). In addition to providing full access to the data, code, and methodology, Strumia (2021) systematically describes and accounts for gender differences in HEP citation networks. His analysis points both to ongoing difficulties in attracting women to HEP and an encouraging—though slow—trend in improvement. Unfortunately, however, the time and effort that Strumia (2021) devoted to collating and quantifying the data are not matched by a similar rigor in interpreting the results. To support his conclusions, he selectively cites available literature and fails to adequately adjust for a range of confounding factors. For example, his analyses do not consider how unobserved factors—for example, a tendency to overcite well-known authors—drive a wedge between quality and citations and correlate with author gender. He also fails to take into account many structural and nonstructural factors—including, but not limited to, direct discrimination and the expectations that women form (and actions they take) in response to it—that undoubtedly lead to gender differences in productivity. We therefore believe that a number of Strumia’s conclusions are not supported by his analysis. Indeed, we reanalyze a subsample of solo-authored papers from his data, adjusting for year and journal of publication, authors’ research age and their lifetime “fame.” Our reanalysis suggests that female-authored papers are actually cited more than male-authored papers. This finding is inconsistent with the “greater male variability” hypothesis that Strumia (2021) proposes to explain many of his results. In the conclusion to his paper, Strumia states that “… dealing with complex systems, any simple interpretation can easily be incomplete …”. We agree entirely. Strumia’s simple—and, more importantly, simplistic—analysis and interpretation are far from complete.