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Breaking the glass door in academia? Looking at the role of scientific fields and contextual factors in moderating the gender gap in recruitment: evidence from Italy Open PDF
(Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2025-07-15)
Gaiaschi, Camilla
Women's presence in academia has sharply increased in recent years, but gender inequalities in career progression persist. Italy makes no exception to this trend as different studies on the promotion gap to associate and to full professors have suggested. However, no measure of the adjusted gender differential in the previous steps of the career, that is in the transition from the post-doc to the assistant professor position, has been provided so far. This paper aims to fulfill this gap by means of an original, longitudinal, and multi-source dataset on the Italian academic population which has allowed to measure the female disadvantage in recruitment by controlling for a large set of confounding characteristics including individual productivity and, most especially, contextual factors, which have been under-explored so far. Results suggest that women face a small adjusted penalty, of around 3-4%, in academic recruitment. However, when disentangling the analyses by scientific field, strong differences emerge, with the gap reaching a maximum of - 10% in physics while being non-significant in many SSH. Within the STEMM, the life sciences, driven by medicine and biology, appear more gender unequal than many hard sciences. Moreover, a growing number of female full professors in the sub-field and working in a department with good financial resources represent two factors that have a moderate role in reducing the gap. All in all, this work sheds light on the importance of organizational and institutional factors in explaining the gender gap thus calling for structural interventions to make universities more inclusive towards women.
Who is publishing journal articles during graduate school? Racial and gender inequalities in biological sciences over time. Open PDF
(American Psychological Association (APA), 2022-02)
Roksa, Josipa
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Wang, Yapeng
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Feldon, David
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Ericson, Matthew
Despite increased enrolment of women and students from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups in doctoral programs, notable inequalities in academic careers persist. We investigate one potential source of these inequalities: publication rates during graduate school. Results, based on a sample of doctoral students in biological sciences across 53 institutions, indicate that both white women and students from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups (African American and Latinx) have lower publication rates than white men. Notably, these gaps grow over time and are not explained by background factors, socialization experiences, or family obligations. The same patterns persist for first-authored publications for African American and Latinx students, but not white women, suggesting potentially differential mechanisms of exclusion. Implications for research and practice are discussed. © 2021 National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education
Reflections on Gender Analyses of Bibliographic Corpora Open PDF
(2019)
Mihaljević, H.
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Tullney, M.
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Santamaría, L.
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Steinfeldt, C.
The interplay between an academic's gender and their scholarly output is a riveting topic at the intersection of scientometrics, data science, gender studies, and sociology. Its effects can be studied to analyze the role of gender in research productivity, tenure and promotion standards, collaboration and networks, or scientific impact, among others. The typical methodology in this field of research is based on a number of assumptions that are customarily not discussed in detail in the relevant literature, but undoubtedly merit a critical examination. Presumably the most confronting aspect is the categorization of gender. An author's gender is typically inferred from their name, further reduced to a binary feature by an algorithmic procedure. This and subsequent data processing steps introduce biases whose effects are hard to estimate. In this report we describe said problems and discuss the reception and interplay of this line of research within the field. We also outline the effect of obstacles, such as non-availability of data and code for transparent communication. Building on our research on gender effects on scientific publications, we challenge the prevailing methodology in the field and offer a critical reflection on some of its flaws and pitfalls. Our observations are meant to open up the discussion around the need and feasibility of more elaborated approaches to tackle gender in conjunction with analyses of bibliographic sources. Copyright © 2019 Mihaljević, Tullney, Santamaría and Steinfeldt.
Early career performance and its correlation with gender and publication output during doctoral education Open PDF
(2020)
Lindahl, J.
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Colliander, C.
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Danell, R.
Publishing in peer-reviewed journals as a part of the doctoral education is common practice in many countries. The publication output of doctoral students is increasingly used in selection processes for funding and employment in their early careers. Against the backdrop of this development, the aim of this study is to examine (1) how performance during the doctoral education affect the probability of attaining research excellence in the early career; and (2) if there is performance differences between males and females in the early career and to which degree these gender differences can be explained by performance differences during the doctoral education. The data consist of Swedish doctoral students employed at the faculty of science and technology and the faculty of medicine at a Swedish university. Our main conclusions are that (1) research performance during the doctoral education has a positive effect on attaining excellence in the early career; (2) there is an interaction between publication volume and excellence during doctoral education suggesting that a combination of quantity and quality in doctoral students’ performance is indicative of future excellence; (3) there are performance differences in the early career indicating that males have a higher probability of attaining excellence than females, and; (4) this difference is partly explained by performance differences during the doctoral education. © 2019, The Author(s).
Visualising Bibliographic Metadata Using CAQDAS in the Research on the Gender Gap in STEM Studies in Higher Education
(2023)
Verdugo-Castro, S.
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Sánchez-Gómez, M.ªC.
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García-Holgado, A.
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García-Peñalvo, F.J.
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Costa, A.P.
Besides providing the consulted publication’s findings, the literature review can offer information through metadata. Computer-Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software (CAQDAS) can support visualising bibliometric metadata through RIS files. The usefulness is to provide an interactive image of the reality and actuality of scientific production. This article presents a case study to exemplify how metadata can be analysed and visualised using CAQDAS. The topic for the case study is the gender gap in STEM studies in higher education. The study aims to identify the value and usefulness of data visualisation in representing bibliometric data to support literature review processes. The phenomenon of the gender gap in the STEM education sector is used as a case study. The research questions addressed by the study are: (1) What does CAQDAS contribute to the results obtained?; (2) What are the possible causes of the gender gap? The analysis concludes that the cultural, social, educational, family, and peer group environment generates positive and negative force fields when deciding which studies to pursue; some people follow the patterns expected of them according to their gender. Finally, data visualisation helps understand the scientific evolution of a phenomenon and supports the research on a particular topic. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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.
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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.
Mid-career field switches reduce gender disparities in academic publishing Open PDF
(2020)
Thelwall, M.
The continuing low proportions of women in most STEM fields in many countries is an ongoing concern, with no agreement about the fundamental causes or effective remedial actions. One previous study has found that professional women are more likely to switch from a (not necessarily academic) STEM career than professional women in comparable non-STEM jobs, reducing the overall numbers of STEM women. This study investigates whether the same is true for long term academics, and hence could partly account for current gender disparities. Based on the Scopus subject categories of the first and last five publications 2001–2018 of people in 31 countries with publishing careers starting after 2000, female researchers switching fields mid-career tend to move to fields with fewer women, relative to men switching fields mid-career. Thus, mid-career field changes within academia do not help to explain continuing gender disparities in publishing and other explanations must be sought. © 2020, Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary.
Do females create higher impact research? Scopus citations and Mendeley readers for articles from five countries Open PDF
(2018)
Thelwall, M.
There are known gender imbalances in participation in scientific fields, from female dominance of nursing to male dominance of mathematics. It is not clear whether there is also a citation imbalance, with some claiming that male-authored research tends to be more cited. No previous study has assessed gender differences in the readers of academic research on a large scale, however. In response, this article assesses whether there are gender differences in the average citations and/or Mendeley readers of academic publications. Field normalised logged Scopus citations and Mendeley readers from mid-2018 for articles published in 2014 were investigated for articles with first authors from India, Spain, Turkey, the UK and the USA in up to 251 fields with at least 50 male and female authors. Although female-authored research is less cited in Turkey (-4.0%) and India (-3.6%), it is marginally more cited in Spain (0.4%), the UK (0.4%), and the USA (0.2%). Female-authored research has fewer Mendeley readers in India (-1.1%) but more in Spain (1.4%), Turkey (1.1%), the UK (2.7%) and the USA (3.0%). Thus, whilst there may be little practical gender difference in citation impact in countries with mature science systems, the higher female readership impact suggests a wider audience for female-authored research. The results also show that the conclusions from a gender analysis depend on the field normalisation method. A theoretically informed decision must therefore be made about which normalisation to use. The results also suggest that arithmetic mean-based field normalisation is favourable to males. © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Gender differences in research areas, methods and topics: Can people and thing orientations explain the results? Open PDF
(2019)
Thelwall, M.
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Bailey, C.
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Tobin, C.
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Bradshaw, N.-A.
Although the gender gap in academia has narrowed, females are underrepresented within some fields in the USA. Prior research suggests that the imbalances between science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields may be partly due to greater male interest in things and greater female interest in people, or to off-putting masculine cultures in some disciplines. To seek more detailed insights across all subjects, this article compares practising US male and female researchers between and within 285 narrow Scopus fields inside 26 broad fields from their first-authored articles published in 2017. The comparison is based on publishing fields and the words used in article titles, abstracts, and keywords. The results cannot be fully explained by the people/thing dimensions. Exceptions include greater female interest in veterinary science and cell biology and greater male interest in abstraction, patients, and power/control fields, such as politics and law. These may be due to other factors, such as the ability of a career to provide status or social impact or the availability of alternative careers. As a possible side effect of the partial people/thing relationship, females are more likely to use exploratory and qualitative methods and males are more likely to use quantitative methods. The results suggest that the necessary steps of eliminating explicit and implicit gender bias in academia are insufficient and might be complemented by measures to make fields more attractive to minority genders. © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Gender differences and patenting in Latin America: understanding female participation in commercial science Open PDF
(2020)
Sifontes, D.
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Morales, R.
Although female involvement in science and technology has been growing over recent years, it is still low. Latin America is no exception. Even though the Latin American region has achieved significant accomplishments in terms of gender parity, women’s participation in patenting activities remains small compared to that of men. The aim of this study is to explain the rate of female participation in patenting activity. We gather information from 3081 US patents granted to assignees in Latin America. The countries of our sample are Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, Chile, Cuba, Colombia, México, Panamá, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. The study period is from 1976 to 2011. This study reveals that the number of US patent granted with female involvement to the countries in our sample is only 22%. We use a probit model to explain women participation in patenting. Results suggest that external and internal collaboration, the institutional sector of the grantee, and innovations related to the life sciences have an effect on the probability of having female participation in patenting in Latin America. Our findings also show that the fertility rate and the human development of countries impact women participation in patenting in the Latin American region. © 2020, Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary.

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