Forty years of gender disparities in Russian science: a historical bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Gender disparities persist in several areas of society and scientific research is no exception. This study describes the evolution of the place of women in Russian science from 1973 to 2012, in terms of published research output, research productivity, international and national collaboration, and scientific impact, taking into account the socioeconomic, political and historic context of the country, which was marked by the fall of the USSR in 1991. The results show that gender parity is far from being achieved. Women remain underrepresented in terms of their contribution to research output and scientific impact in almost all disciplines, with Mathematics and Physics, research areas in which Russia is specialized, having the largest gap. Men and women show different collaboration patterns on the national and international level, whereas women are preeminent on the national scene, men are on the international one. Although the impact of women's scientific output significantly increases after the fall of the USSR, the gap between both genders remains stable over time for most of the disciplines. As a result, this increase cannot be interpreted as an improvement of the women's relative influence in Russian science, but rather an improvement of Russian science impact in general.

Gender Representation in Russian Academic Journals

“…Biomedical Chemistry, Questions of Psychology, and Russian Literature have a high proportion of female-authored publication. Paul-Hus et al (2015) confirms the results of this study: the proportion of output is the largest in psychology, clinical medicine, and biomedical research. While biochemistry was not mentioned separately, Biomedical Chemistry may correspond to clinical medicine and biomedical research specialities.…”

“…In the past decade, much research on Russian gender representation in academic publications has focused on wide usage of international databases and international citation indexes (Wilson, Markusova 2004;Markusova et al 2009;Pislyakov, Dyachenko 2010;Lewison, Markusova 2011;Paul-Hus et al 2015). The specificity of international databases is that they mostly include publications from natural sciences and engineering, rather than social science and humanities articles.…”

Are there gender differences among researchers from industrial/organizational psychology?

“…These papers have covered many different fields, ranging from material sciences (Mauleón and Bordons 2006) to construction research (Powell et al 2009), invasion ecology (Heidi Prozesky and Boshoff 2012), and social sciences in general (e.g., van Arensbergen et al 2012). Furthermore, researchers have obtained data for researchers in many countries, including Canada (e.g., Larivière et al 2011), Croatia (Prpić 2002), Finland (Puuska 2010), India (Garg and Kumar 2014), Russia (Paul-Hus et al 2015), South Africa (Heidi Prozesky and Boshoff 2012), Spain (e.g., Barrios et al 2013), and the US (e.g., Joy 2006).…”

The Italian University Habilitation and the Challenge of Increasing the Representation of Women in Academia

“…The lack of female senior academics has been documented in recent years in many countries [20,[26][27][28][29][30]. For example, at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, the gender ratio of graduate students was about 1.2 male to 1 female in 2006, yet the male-female ratio of group leaders was over 9 to 1 in the same year [31].…”