The research discipline of computer science (CS) has a well-publicized gender disparity. Multiple studies estimate the ratio of women among publishing researchers to be around 15–30%. Many explanatory factors have been studied in association with this gender gap, including differences in collaboration patterns. Here, we extend this body of knowledge by looking at differences in collaboration patterns specific to various fields and subfields of CS. We curated a dataset of nearly 20,000 unique authors of some 7000 top conference papers from a single year. We manually assigned a field and subfield to each conference and a gender to most researchers. We then measured the gender gap in each subfield as well as five other collaboration metrics, which we compared to the gender gap. Our main findings are that the gender gap varies greatly by field, ranging from 6% female authors in theoretical CS to 42% in CS education; subfields with a higher gender gap also tend to exhibit lower female productivity, larger coauthor groups, and higher gender homophily. Although women published fewer single-author papers, we did not find an association between single-author papers and the ratio of female researchers in a subfield.
In a recent study, we found that the ratio of femaleto-male authors in computer systems conferences is particularly low, even compared to the rest of computer science (CS). 1 The large and statistically significant underrepresentation cannot be fully explained by review bias, differences in collaboration patterns, and numerous other demographic and conference factors alone. 2
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.