The 100,000 most influential scientists rank: the underrepresentation of Brazilian women in academia

Abstract

Despite the progress observed in recent years, women are still underrepresented in science worldwide, especially at top positions. Many factors contribute to women progressively leaving academia at different stages of their career, including motherhood, harassment and conscious and unconscious discrimination. Implicit bias plays a major negative role in recognition, promotions and career advancement of female scientists.Recently, a rank of the most infl uential scientists in the world was created based on several metrics, including the number of published papers and citations. Here, we analyzed the representation of Brazilian scientists in this rank, focusing on gender.Female Brazilian scientists are greatly underrepresented in the rank (11% in the Top 100,000; 18% in the Top 2%). Possible reasons for this observed scenario are related to the metrics used to rank scientists, which reproduce and amplify the well-known implicit bias in peer-review and citations. Male scientists have more self-citation than female scientists and positions in the rank varied when self-citations were included, suggesting that self-citation by male scientists increases their visibility. Discussions on the repercussions of such ranks are pivotal to avoid deepening the gender gap in science.

Brazilian female researchers do not publish less despite an academic structure that deepens sex gap

“…Thus, the diagnosis of the Brazilian Entomology scenario presented here revealed that female researchers do not publish less, but they appeared less in the academic scenario probably due to its structure. Not only can we observe this pattern at the ABC but at the 100,000 most influential scientists in the world [ 41 ], where only 0.25–0.30% are Brazilians [ 25 , 41 , 42 ] and, among these, only 11% of those were women [ 25 ]. Also, around 1% of scientists worldwide among the 100k most influential were assigned in the subfield of Entomology and, among them, seven are Brazilians, all male researchers [ 41 , 42 ].…”

“…The scientific community constantly considers as influential a scientist who publishes a high number of articles, with high number of citations [ 25 ]. However, the number of papers and of citations, often equalized with scientific impact, has been repeatedly shown not to reflect the quality of the scientific endeavor [ 12 , 46 ].…”

“…However, the number of papers and of citations, often equalized with scientific impact, has been repeatedly shown not to reflect the quality of the scientific endeavor [ 12 , 46 ]. For example, the H-index is highly sensitive to self-citations, a behavior typical of many male researchers [ 47 ], which then makes this metric reflect more self-confidence than scientific quality [ 25 ]. Yet, many gender gap studies use these metrics because they are easily obtainable and because we are evaluated by these standards.…”

“…Scientific publications are used as markers of merit [ 21 ] and prestige, increasing researchers’ visibility in the academic community [ 22 ]. Highly productive and cited researchers tend to stand in front of new opportunities and receive more grants [ 23 ], which in turn generates a continuous loop of publications that feeds-back on implicit biases in peer review and citations [ 24 , 25 ]. For example, the ’productivity puzzle’, which refers to the supposed explanation for the underrepresentation of women because they are less productive, is still an open question [ 26 ].…”

Bias against parents in science hits women harder

“…While academics state that they are not gender biased, research shows that both women and men are biased against women in this environment (Roper, 2019). Bias against women are also evident in metrics used to evaluate academics, from impact factors to reference letters (Fortin et al, 2021), which in turn hurts women's recognition and prestige (Oliveira et al, 2021). Most of the time, this bias can be implicit, that is, not explicitly perceived.…”