ObjectiveConcerns have been raised that the COVID-19 pandemic has shifted research productivity to the disadvantage of women in academia, particularly in early career stages. In this study, we aimed to assess the pandemic’s effect on women’s COVID-19-related publishing over the first year of the pandemic.Methods and resultsWe compared the gender distribution of first authorships for 42 898 publications on COVID-19 from 1 February 2020 to 31 January 2021 to 483 232 publications appearing in the same journals during the same period the year prior. We found that the gender gap—the percentage of articles on which men versus women were first authors—widened by 14 percentage points during the COVID-19 pandemic, despite many pertinent research fields showing near equal proportions of men and women first authors publishing in the same fields before the pandemic. Longitudinal analyses revealed that the significant initial expansions of the gender gap began to trend backwards to expected values over time in many fields. As women may have been differentially affected depending on their geography, we also assessed the gender distribution of first authorships grouped by countries and geographical areas. While we observed a significant reduction of the shares of women first authors in almost all countries, longitudinal analyses confirmed a resolving trend over time.ConclusionThe reduction in women’s COVID-19-related research output appears particularly concerning as many disciplines informing the response to the pandemic had near equal gender shares of first authorship in the year prior to the pandemic. The acute productivity drain with the onset of the pandemic magnifies deep-rooted obstacles on the way to gender equity in scientific contribution.
This initiative examined systematically the extent to which a large set of archival research findings generalizes across contexts. We repeated the key analyses for 29 original strategic management effects in the same context (direct reproduction) as well as in 52 novel time periods and geographies; 45% of the reproductions returned results matching the original reports together with 55% of tests in different spans of years and 40% of tests in novel geographies. Some original findings were associated with multiple new tests. Reproducibility was the best predictor of generalizability—for the findings that proved directly reproducible, 84% emerged in other available time periods and 57% emerged in other geographies. Overall, only limited empirical evidence emerged for context sensitivity. In a forecasting survey, independent scientists were able to anticipate which effects would find support in tests in new samples.
How does homophilous collaboration influence women's early career progress? To answer this question, we turn to a granular dataset of 3,233 highly qualified junior life scientists who receive mentored, early career sponsorship from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and analyze their publication trajectories as careers unfold. Employing a matched sample approach that exploits variance in the sets of research contacts the junior scientists start out with, we distinguish sex differences in collaboration choices from potential differences in collaboration opportunities. We document that outsized gender homophily among women exists and primarily stems from how female leaders of scientific projects assemble their teams. Women continue same-sex collaborations as lead authors at twice the rate compared to men, on average, and in particular when the mentor is part of the author team or when the focal junior scientist leads the team. As such, systematic gender homophily among female scientists may engender the sponsorship and resources needed to motivate young women to join and pursue an academic career. On the flip side, we show that author teams led by women receive 11% less citations, on average, and up to 29% less citations for work of comparable caliber published in the most influential journals. Taken together, while women's propensity to working with other women may support early career researchers, biased attention to women's work may harm careers and, in particular, women who publish in the highest-impact journals and who would otherwise be poised to narrowing gender gaps at more senior career stages.
Analysis of the association between Altmetric scores and the gender of first and last authors of articles published in top cardiovascular research journals shows that women receive on average less attention for their work.
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