Studies have 3 times more men in citations than women – 11/27/2023 – Science

The gender gap has been falling in science, but women remain underrepresented in the authorship of scientific articles, especially among those that receive the highest volume of citations.

In the group of 2% of authors with the most references among peers in studies published in 2021, there were 3.21 times more men than women. The male predominance is even greater when researchers with more than 30 years of activity are considered: 6.41 times.

The difference, however, is improving. In the younger group, with the first publications after 2011, the advantage for men drops to 2.28 times.

These and other data are part of a new study, published in the specialized journal PLoS Biology, which analyzed a base of 5.8 million authors with identified gender — each of them with at least five publications. Men accounted for about 3.8 million entries, while women accounted for 2 million.

To deal with this enormous volume of information, those responsible for the work used a series of automated data analysis tools. The material was taken from the Scopus database, which brings together several disciplines and brings together more than 80 million scientific articles.

The definition of the group of 2% with the most mentions among peers took into account not only the number of citations itself (with differences whether they were the main author or not, for example), but particularities of each area. Analyzes were also carried out with and without self-citations, which did not result in significant differences.

Gender classification was done using a machine learning system. The algorithm analyzed the authors’ first name and assigned a gender based on the likelihood of that name being associated with a man or a woman.

The model was trained on a large dataset of male and female names, coming from different origins, countries and cultures. The final analysis only included gender assignments with confidence scores greater than 85%.

The article evaluated the gender issue in 174 subareas of knowledge. For better analysis and interpretation, the results were further divided into smaller groups, depending on the date of entry into activity of the analyzed authors. Thus, it was possible to follow some of the evolution of the scenario over time.

This analysis showed progress towards gender balance, albeit slowly. Among the group of younger researchers, 32 of the 174 areas analyzed had an equivalent or even higher number of women among the most cited authors.

This marked difference in female presence in the different subgroups analyzed would have multifactorial origins.

“Some areas are likely to have already started out with a more pronounced gender imbalance and would take longer for the balance to be achieved. This could involve models of available opportunities, perceptions, misguided views and a lack of organizational support to correct gender differences in these disciplines” , I told Sheet one of the authors of the work, John Ioannidis, a researcher at Stanford University, in the United States.

“At the same time, a perfectly impartial world might still have more women cited in some fields, while there would be more men cited in some others. I hope in equal numbers, but we can’t expect everything to always be 50-50 in all the subfields of science.”

Scientific publications and their respective peer citations are one of the main evaluation metrics used in the academic world. In the new study, the researchers argue that this data can contribute to efforts to promote diversity and inclusion more broadly in science.

“Policy makers and funding agencies must be aware of this gender gap and monitor its evolution, proactively trying to eliminate it. After all, many of the decisions they make can make things better or, unfortunately, make them worse,” says Ioannidis .

In the opinion of Helena Nader, president of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (ABC), women face additional challenges in their academic careers, as they typically spend more time caring for children and carrying out domestic tasks than men.

“Unfortunately, this is a reality in Brazil and in many other countries. There is an overload at home that weighs heavily on women. It has improved, but there is still a long way to go”, says Nader, who was not involved in the study.

“It is no surprise that several studies have shown that, during the Covid-19 pandemic, productivity [em termos de artigos] of male scientists increased, while that of female scientists decreased”, he explains.

According to the president of ABC, another barrier may be the difficulty of being away from home, reducing female participation in scientific conferences. “This is one of the hypotheses that is present in other works. I think it makes sense. Congresses play an important role in citations, as people also mention who they met at these events. If women participate less in congresses, this could have an impact.”

The new study by Stanford researchers also sought to break down authors by nationality, although they recognize that this effort was complicated for several reasons, from the difficulty of finding information about their place of birth to the geographic mobility of scientists throughout their careers.

In general, the criterion of including the nationality of the researchers’ first publication as information about their country of origin was adopted.

In the general database, the number of authors from high-income countries (such as the United States and the United Kingdom) was almost double those from developing nations (such as Brazil), but the difference fell substantially among younger scientists , already a reflection of the broad presence of the Chinese in the last decade.

The number of researchers whose gender was assigned as “uncertain”, however, was higher among those from countries with fewer resources: 56.2% versus 25.3%.

The two groups of countries had a similar preponderance of men over women among the most cited authors (3.18 and 3.39). However, in the division between those who started publishing after 2011, the imbalance decreased more in high-income countries, reaching 2.09. In the others, it was 2.93.

“I think this [a disparidade de gênero no topo das pesquisas] It means that many extremely talented women do not have enough opportunities to flourish and prosper. This is a great loss for them, but also for the scientific community at large, which loses important contributions from some of the best minds,” said John Ioannidis of Stanford University.