Gender Disparities in Science? Dropout, Productivity, Collaborations and Success of Male and Female Computer Scientists

Abstract

Scienti¯c collaborations shape ideas as well as innovations and are both the substrate for, and the outcome of, academic careers. Recent studies show that gender inequality is still present in many scienti¯c practices ranging from hiring to peer-review processes and grant applications. In this work, we investigate gender-speci¯c di®erences in collaboration patterns of more than one million computer scientists over the course of 47 years. We explore how these patterns change over years and career ages and how they impact scienti¯c success. Our results highlight that successful male and female scientists reveal the same collaboration patterns: compared to scientists in the same career age, they tend to collaborate with more colleagues than other scientists, seek innovations as brokers and establish longer-lasting and more repetitive collaborations. However, women are on average less likely to adopt the collaboration patterns that are related with success, more likely to embed into ego networks devoid of structural holes, and they exhibit stronger gender homophily as well as a consistently higher dropout rate than men in all career ages.

Automatically assembling a full census of an academic field

“…At the same time, fewer women than men were retained from the groups of 2011 associate professors (71.3% vs. 72.6%) and full professors Aggregating across ranks, attrition rates for women and men are similar (13.7% vs. 12.4%), but slightly higher for women. This modest difference is consistent with the "leaky pipeline," a metaphor stemming from a large body of literature showing that women leave academia at slightly higher rates than men at all stages of an academic career [33][34][35], including computer science in particular [36]. A key question, however, is whether these observed differences can be attributed to fluctuations.…”

Patterns of authorship in ecology and evolution: First, last, and corresponding authorship vary with gender and geography

“…In addition, or alternatively, women may be more comfortable working with other women, possibly because women tend to both seek and provide more social support than do men in professional environments (Wallace, ), and female students tend to feel more belonging, motivation, and confidence when working with female mentors (Dennehy & Dasgupta, ). Thus, female graduate students may prefer female mentors (Blake‐Beard, Bayne, Crosby, & Muller, ) and female scientists may preferentially collaborate with other women (Jadidi, Karimi, Lietz, & Wagner, ). Female scientists may also know more female candidates for mentorships, possibly due to shared experiences or homophily in social networks (Durbin, ), and thus be in a better position to scout for female students (Van den Brink & Benschop, ).…”

“…The analyses we present here show that this pattern holds up across the broader ecological literature. We think the most likely explanation for this difference is that women leave academic research at a higher rate than do men (Fox, 2008;Jadidi et al, 2018;Mihaljević-Brandt et al, 2016), and thus either defer the final steps of publication to their coauthors or deflect subsequent correspondence (post-publication queries) to authors who remained in science. Also, women in science typically move between institutions more than do men, for example, as a trailing spouse (Ward & Wolf-Wendel, 2017), and thus may have less stable contact addresses than do men.…”

Gender differences in participation and reward on Stack Overflow

“…Research shows that women are significantly underrepresented in academic fields "believed to require attributes such as brilliance and genius" [33] including computer science. When they do choose to enter these fields, they have higher drop-out rates [28] and have a harder time being successful because of "masculine" culture, discrimination, or the handicap of lower self-confidence [8]. Computer science is one of the fields where gender-based occupational segregation is still strong.…”