Quantitative evaluation of gender bias in astronomical publications from citation counts

By Neven Caplar, S. Tacchella, Simon Birrer. Nature Astronomy, 2016

415 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Numerous studies across different research fields have shown that both male and female referees consistently give higher scores to work done by men than to identical work done by women1,2,3. In addition, women are under-represented in prestigious publications and authorship positions4,5 and women receive ~10% fewer citations6,7. In astronomy, similar biases have been measured in conference participation8,9 and success rates for telescope proposals10,11. Even though the number of doctorate degrees awarded to women is constantly increasing, women still tend to be under-represented in faculty positions12. Spurred by these findings, we measure the role of gender in the number of citations that papers receive in astronomy. To account for the fact that the properties of papers written by men and women differ intrinsically, we use a random forest algorithm to control for the non-gender-specific properties of these papers. Here we show that papers authored by women receive 10.4 ± 0.9% fewer citations than would be expected if the papers with the same non-gender-specific properties were written by men. Gender discrimination is very much an issue in academia generally and in astronomy specifically. Through machine learning techniques, astronomy papers authored by women are shown to have 10% systematically fewer citations than those authored by men.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Sociology and Political Science, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aab323d6801972b3aa10045a1785f1e2eeb46ffe

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Citations in the corpus

Racial and ethnic imbalance in neuroscience reference lists and intersections with gender (2020, background): “references lists across several fields including neuroscience (33), international relations (30), astronomy (31), and political science (29, 32).”
The extent and drivers of gender imbalance in neuroscience reference lists (2020, background): “Recent studies of such differential engagement have found not only that people from marginalized groups are broadly undercited in fields such as communications (26) and philosophy (27), but also that women-led research in particular tends to receive fewer citations than comparable papers led by men ”
Learning in brain-computer interface control evidenced by joint decomposition of brain and behavior (2019, background): “Recent work in neuroscience and other fields has identified a bias in citation practices such that papers fromwomen andotherminorities are under-cited relative to the number of such papers in the field [18, 20, 31, 73, 104].”