The Role of Gender in Scholarly Authorship

By Jevin D. West, Jennifer Jacquet, Molly M. King, Shelley J. Correll, Carl T. Bergstrom. PLoS ONE, 2012

794 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Gender disparities appear to be decreasing in academia according to a number of metrics, such as grant funding, hiring, acceptance at scholarly journals, and productivity, and it might be tempting to think that gender inequity will soon be a problem of the past. However, a large-scale analysis based on over eight million papers across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities reveals a number of understated and persistent ways in which gender inequities remain. For instance, even where raw publication counts seem to be equal between genders, close inspection reveals that, in certain fields, men predominate in the prestigious first and last author positions. Moreover, women are significantly underrepresented as authors of single-authored papers. Academics should be aware of the subtle ways that gender disparities can occur in scholarly authorship.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9faf52d933476ae0cca2f9de4c258c7199e4b089

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Citations in the corpus

The gender gap in science: How long until women are equally represented? (2018, background): “For example, computational studies have so far mapped differences in gender ratio across research disciplines [5,6], compared geographic regions [6,7], revealed biases in citation rate [7–9], and shown that women tend to do a greater share of experimental work [10].”
Ethical Machine Learning in Healthcare (2020, background): “Female scientists tend to study different scientific subfields, even within the same larger field — for example, within sociology, they have been historically better-represented on papers about sociology of the family or early childhood (48) — and express different opinions about ethical dilemmas in”
Sources of bias in artificial intelligence that perpetuate healthcare disparities—A global review (2022, result): “Our results, although specific to the field of clinical AI, are consistent with this literature [65].”
Men Set Their Own Cites High: Gender and Self-citation across Fields and over Time (2016, methodology): “A prior analysis (West et al. 2013) used the hierarchical map equation (Rosvall and Bergstrom 2011) to create a nested hierarchy of all documents in the network dataset.”
Gender and international diversity improves equity in peer review (2018, background): “Articles authored by women are disproportionately underrepresented in the most prestigious and high-profile scientific journals [8–13].”
The Pandemic Penalty: The Gendered Effects of COVID-19 on Scientific Productivity (2020, methodology): “Both the specific package we used and other similar gender algorithms (e.g., genderize.io) have been used in other studies (e.g., Amano-Patiño et al. 2020; Vincent-Lamarre, Sugimoto, and Larivière 2020b; West et al. 2013).”
Quantitative evaluation of gender bias in astronomical publications from citation counts (2016, background): “The following ADS entries are removed: (1) entries with zero citations or zero references (4,417 ADS entries); (2) authors who have only published in Science and/or Nature (5,484 ADS entries); (3) entries with no specified author (491 ADS entries); (4) entries with no first name for the first author”
Diversity in the Economics Profession: A New Attack on an Old Problem (2016, positive): “Since 1974, the AEA’s Committee on the Status of Minority Groups in the Economics Profession (CSMGEP) has sponsored a Summer Training Program aimed at improving diversity in the economics profession. The program, which has been hosted at a number of universities over time, runs about 7–8 weeks durin”
Editor and reviewer gender influence the peer review process but not peer review outcomes at an ecology journal (2016, background): “The gender ratio of researchers varies not just among the major STEM fields (Leslie et al. 2015) but also among subdisciplines within fields (e.g. West et al. 2013; see especially the gender project at eigenfactor.org).”