Abstract
Ongoing problems attracting women into many Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects have many potential explanations. This article investigates whether the possible undercitation of women associates with lower proportions of, or increases in, women in a subject. It uses six million articles published in 1996–2012 across up to 331 fields in six mainly English-speaking countries: Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. The proportion of female first- and last-authored articles in each year was calculated and 4,968 regressions were run to detect first-author gender advantages in field normalized article citations. The proportion of female first authors in each field correlated highly between countries and the female first-author citation advantages derived from the regressions correlated moderately to strongly between countries, so both are relatively field specific. There was a weak tendency in the United States and New Zealand for female citation advantages to be stronger in fields with fewer women, after excluding small fields, but there was no other association evidence. There was no evidence of female citation advantages or disadvantages to be a cause or effect of changes in the proportions of women in a field for any country. Inappropriate uses of career-level citations are a likelier source of gender inequities.
Highlights
Female authors are underrepresented in almost all countries and most institutions (Guglielmi, 2019), but not all broad fields
There was a weak tendency in the United States and New Zealand for female citation advantages to be stronger in fields with fewer women, after excluding small fields, but there was no other association evidence
It is important to understand the causes of female underrepresentation in STEM and academia overall
Summary
Female authors are underrepresented in almost all countries and most institutions (Guglielmi, 2019), but not all broad fields. As women tend to dominate the health care, elementary education, and the domestic sphere (HEED) broad fields (Tellhed, Bäckström, & Björklund, 2017), their STEM scarcity raises the suspicion that women are being discouraged from some areas. It is important to understand the causes of female underrepresentation in STEM and academia overall. This article focuses on one hypothesized cause: the perceived value of female contributions to research, as reflected in citations to their work. Bias against women translating into undercitation for their articles has been argued to be a factor in female underrepresentation (Larivière, Ni, et al, 2013). This article uses a new approach to investigate whether gendered citation differentials may have
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