Gender differences in scientific collaborations: Women are more egalitarian than men

Araújo, Eduardo B.; Araújo, Nuno A. M.; Moreira, André A.; Herrmann, Hans J.; Andrade, José S.

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0176791

Cited by 87 publications

(87 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…The differences in the number of coauthors between men and women is intriguing, especially when considering recent research on the patterns of collaboration in scientific research. A number of studies have shown that men copublish with men and that women copublish with women more often than would be expected by random chance, a term referred to as gender homophily . The tendency toward gender homophily could explain why men had significantly greater numbers of coauthors than women in the current study, especially when considering that men outnumbered women 3:1 in the study population.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 61%

Is the gender gap closing in otolaryngology subspecialties? An analysis of research productivity

et al. 2019

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Objective: The proportion of women specializing in otolaryngology-head and neck surgery (Oto-HNS) and seeking fellowship training has steadily increased over the last several years. In academic Oto-HNS, gender differences exist in research productivity, scholarly impact, and funding. This study aims to evaluate gender differences in academic productivity between otolaryngologists in early, mid-, and later careers stages and within various subspecialties.Methods: Departmental websites for all Oto-HNS residency programs were accessed, and data including gender, academic rank, and fellowship training/subspecialty field was collected. Bibliometric data including h-index, publication years, number of citations, documents, and coauthors was obtained from the Scopus database. Career groups were defined as early (1-5 years), mid-(6-15 years), and later (16+ years). Continuous data was compared using the t test.Results: Data was collected on 1,754 academic otolaryngologists (412 women, 1,342 men). Overall, men exhibited significantly higher h-indices, number of documents, citations, and coauthors and actively published for more years compared to women (P < 0.0001 for all variables). Similar trends persisted across all subspecialties. When authors were broken down into career groups, women and men showed similar research productivity across all career groups in the subspecialties of otology, facial plastics, and rhinology; however, in head and neck, laryngology, and pediatrics, women continued to lag behind men.Conclusion: This study suggests that female otolaryngologists within certain subspecialties are keeping pace with their male counterparts in publication productivity in the early career time frame. This represents a change from prior studies which have shown women to be less productive in the early career period.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 61%

Is the gender gap closing in otolaryngology subspecialties? An analysis of research productivity

et al. 2019

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“…A growing body of research shows that women are disadvantaged across the stages of academic publishing, including collaboration, peer-reviewing, readership, citation, and media coverage. Men are more likely to collaborate with men than with women and women are given less credit when collaborating with men [1][2][3]. Women are less likely to be the first or last author on articles published in prestigious journals [4,5], women's research is less likely to be read, shared, and cited [4,6,7] for alternative perspectives, please see [8,9], women are held to higher peer review standards and hence female-authored papers take half a year longer to publish [10], women are less likely to be invited to submit papers for journals and to act as reviewers [11][12][13], men are less likely to respond to requests by women editors to review papers [14,15], and women's research is less likely to receive media coverage [16,17].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The gender gap in commenting: Women are less likely than men to comment on (men’s) published research

Fuller

et al. 2020

PLoS ONE

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Subtle gender dynamics in the publishing process involving collaboration, peer-review, readership, citation, and media coverage disadvantage women in academia. In this study we consider whether commenting on published work is also gendered. Using all the comments published over a 16-year period in PNAS (N = 869) and Science (N = 481), we find that there is a gender gap in the authorship of comment letters: women are less likely than men to comment on published academic research. This disparity is greater than gender differences in the publication of research articles. There is also a gendered pattern in commenting: women comment writers are relatively less likely to engage with men's research. If left unaddressed, these patterns in academic commenting could impede scholarly exchange between men and women and further marginalize women within the scientific community.

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“…This is in contrast to the findings of 71 , who found that the difference in co-author numbers between genders could be fully explained by the lower publication rate and shorter career lengths of women scientists. Nonetheless, collaborative style 97–99 could be equally as important as the number of collaborators for determining the value of collaborations to a researchers’ career. Furthermore, the publishing networks of female and male focal authors showed similar levels of consistency and connectedness, suggesting that any inherent differences in sociality between female and male researchers are likely small.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Similarly, having an inner social circle composed predominantly of women predicts women’s leadership success 105 . Alternatively, since researchers are more likely to publish with colleagues of the same gender than is expected by chance 99,106 , gender preferences in co-authors may further reinforce gender differences in career progression and length. This effect could be further compounded since high-performing (and therefore ideal collaborator 102,107 ) male academics employ relatively fewer women, and thus provide fewer associated collaboration opportunities 24 .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Regardless of discipline, finding and establishing new collaborations is not always straightforward, and working more collaboratively may require overcoming barriers, such as having a small peer network, or lacking access to funding 113 . This may be a particular challenge for female researchers, who represent less of the workforce as seniority increases 9 , and especially since male researchers typically prefer to collaborate with other men 99,106 . Researchers may also have concerns over the risk to reward ratio of forming new collaborations 113 .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Sociality enhances survival in science, especially for female researchers

Wal

Thorogood

Horrocks³

2020

Preprint

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Intense competition for limited opportunities means the career path of a scientist is a challenging one, and female scientists in particular are less likely to survive in academia. Collaboration is a key factor in scientific advances, and in social species enhanced sociality improves fitness and longevity. Yet whether sociality influences career progression and survival in science, and how this might differ between genders, is largely unknown. We built authorship social networks from publication records to test how sociality predicts career progression and survival in a cohort of biologists contributing to three international conferences in the 1990s. We show that sociality has the strongest effect for female researchers but, regardless of gender, publishing with many diverse co-authors significantly reduces time to become a principal investigator and increases career duration. Publishing repeatedly with co-authors also enhances career progression in both genders, but reduces career length for men. These findings demonstrate that the value of collaboration extends beyond scientific advances, and can directly benefit the career progression and longevity of research scientists themselves. Efforts to encourage researchers at all levels to invest in collaborations, particularly with female researchers, will help to close the gender gap in science and academia.

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Gender differences in scientific collaborations: Women are more egalitarian than men

Cited by 87 publications

References 25 publications

Is the gender gap closing in otolaryngology subspecialties? An analysis of research productivity

Is the gender gap closing in otolaryngology subspecialties? An analysis of research productivity

The gender gap in commenting: Women are less likely than men to comment on (men’s) published research

Sociality enhances survival in science, especially for female researchers

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