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Gendered knowledge in fields and academic careers Open PDF
(2022)
Kim, Lanu
;
Smith, Daniel Scott
;
Hofstra, Bas
;
McFarland, Daniel A.
Women and men often contribute differently to research knowledge. Do differences in these contributions partially explain disparities in academic career outcomes? We explore this by looking at how gender is embodied in research language, and then ascertain whether the adoption of more gendered research language affects career outcomes beyond the researcher's attributes. We identify different forms of gendered knowledge—gender referents (explicit references to sex and gender) and gender-associated terms (words that are implicitly associated with women or men researchers)—by applying natural language processing techniques to nearly one million doctoral dissertations published in the United States between 1980 and 2010. We then determine whether employing gender referents and gender-associated terms affects the course of PhDs’ ensuing careers. We find women researchers have lower chances of securing academic positions than men in every field; explicit references to women as research subjects are modestly rewarded in comparison to references to men; and more career opportunities are afforded to research knowledge associated with men. These results suggest that academia is slowly correcting the traditional and explicit bias of studying men at the exclusion of women. Still, there remains a stronger implicit bias against knowledge associated with women scholars. We discuss relative differences between humanities and social sciences versus natural sciences, technology, engineering, and math, as well as potential treatments for offsetting bias in those fields.
Historical comparison of gender inequality in scientific careers across countries and disciplines Open PDF
(Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2020)
Huang, Junming
;
Gates, Alexander J.
;
Sinatra, Roberta
;
Barabási, Albert-László
There is extensive, yet fragmented, evidence of gender differences in academia suggesting that women are underrepresented in most scientific disciplines and publish fewer articles throughout a career, and their work acquires fewer citations. Here, we offer a comprehensive picture of longitudinal gender differences in performance through a bibliometric analysis of academic publishing 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 publishing career lengths and dropout rates explain a large portion of the reported career-wise differences in productivity and impact, although productivity differences still remain. 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.
Authorship and citation gender trends in immunology and microbiology Open PDF
(2020)
Thelwall, M.A.
Immunology and microbiology research are essential for human and animal health. Unlike many other health fields, they do not usually centre around the curing or helping individual patients but focus on the microscopic scale instead. These fields are interesting from a gender perspective because two theories seeking to explain gender differences in career choices in the USA (people/things and communal/agentic goals) might produce conflicting expectations about their gender balances. This article assesses the gender shares of journal articles and gendered citation rates of five subfields of the Scopus Immunology and Microbiology broad category 1996-2014/18, for research with solely US author affiliations. Only Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology (38% female) had not reached gender parity in publishing by 2018. There was a female first author citation advantage in Parasitology but a disadvantage in Immunology. Immunology, Parasitology and Virology, had female last author citation disadvantages, but all gender effects were much smaller (<5%) than that of an extra author (10%-56%). Citation differences cannot therefore account for the current underrepresentation of women in senior roles. © 2020 FEMS.
Author gender differences in psychology citation impact 1996–2018 Open PDF
(2020)
Thelwall, M.
Academic psychology in the USA is a gender success story in terms of overturning its early male dominance but there are still relatively few senior female psychology researchers. To assess whether there are gender differences in citation impact that might help to explain either of these trends, this study investigates psychology articles since 1996. Seven out of eight Scopus psychology categories had a majority of female first-authored journal articles by 2018. From regression analyses of first and last author gender and team size, female first authors associate with a slightly higher average citation impact, but extra authors have a 10 times stronger association with higher average citation impact. Last author gender has little association with citation impact. Female first authors are more likely to be in larger teams and if team size is attributed to the first author's work, then their apparent influence of female first authors on citation impact doubles. While gender differences in average citation impact are too small to account for gender-related trends in academic psychology, they warn that male-dominated citation-based ranking lists of psychologists do not reflect the state of psychology research today. © 2019 International Union of Psychological Science

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