Abstract
The research discipline of computer science (CS) has a well-publicized gender disparity. Multiple studies estimate the ratio of women among publishing researchers to be around 15–30%. Many explanatory factors have been studied in association with this gender gap, including differences in collaboration patterns. Here, we extend this body of knowledge by looking at differences in collaboration patterns specific to various fields and subfields of CS. We curated a dataset of nearly 20,000 unique authors of some 7000 top conference papers from a single year. We manually assigned a field and subfield to each conference and a gender to most researchers. We then measured the gender gap in each subfield as well as five other collaboration metrics, which we compared to the gender gap. Our main findings are that the gender gap varies greatly by field, ranging from 6% female authors in theoretical CS to 42% in CS education; subfields with a higher gender gap also tend to exhibit lower female productivity, larger coauthor groups, and higher gender homophily. Although women published fewer single-author papers, we did not find an association between single-author papers and the ratio of female researchers in a subfield.
Highlights
The gender gap in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and in particular in computer science (CS), is a well-known and well-studied problem
Before we can look at collaboration patterns, we need to establish a baseline for authorship numbers across genders
Summarizing across all 27,743 authors and omitting the 645 repeated authorships for which we could establish no gender, we find a total of 3833 women, which represents an overall female author ratio (FAR) of 14.1% across authors
Summary
The gender gap in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and in particular in computer science (CS), is a well-known and well-studied problem. It carries significant societal effects, such as inequality in economic opportunities for women and an undersupply of researchers and engineers in the rapidly growing discipline [1,2,3,4]. The gender gap, defined as the difference in participation between men and women, is a complex, multifaceted societal phenomenon [12]. Numerous approaches to understand and perhaps increase the representation of women have focused on aspects such as resource availability, gender stereotypes, child care, structural barriers, gender differences, discrimination, and other factors. This article focuses on one of these factors: the collaboration patterns of paper coauthors across genders and CS fields
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