Abstract
Abstract The growing number of gender studies encourages more refined analyzes and greater conceptualization of the underlying processes of gender gap in science. In Herpetology, previous studies have described gender disparities and a scrutiny of individual interactions may help revealing the mechanisms modelling the global pattern. In this contribution we modeled a co-authorship network, a previously unexplored methodology for gender studies in this discipline, in addition to a broad and classic bibliometric analysis of the discipline. Co-authorship networks were modelled for two South American journals, because this geo-political location is considered to present the best gender balance within general scientific communities. However, we found a pattern of male preferential connections (male homophily) that marginalizes women and maintains the gender gap, at both regional and global scales. This interpretation arises from results coming from multiple analyses, such as high homophily index in collaboration networks, lower female representation in articles than expected in a non-gender biased environment, the decrease of female co-authors when the article leader is a man, and the extreme masculinization of the editorial boards. The homophilic dynamics of the publication process reveals that academic activity is pervasive to unbalanced power relationships. Personal interactions shape the collective experience, tracing back to the Feminist Theory’s axiom: “the personal is political”.
Highlights
Countless studies have documented a bias against women in science (e.g., Ceci and Williams, 2011; Handley et al, 2015; Wang and Degol, 2017; O’Brien et al, 2019; Huang et al, 2020)
Even under the relative favourable condition in Argentinian and Brazilian Herpetology our results showed that gender homophily is one of the main mechanisms modulating the interaction structure in Herpetology
Positive mens homophily was detected in the South American Journal of Herpetology network model and male homophily was detected in international publications and in journal editorial boards
Summary
Countless studies have documented a bias against women in science (e.g., Ceci and Williams, 2011; Handley et al, 2015; Wang and Degol, 2017; O’Brien et al, 2019; Huang et al, 2020). Argentina and Brazil stand out among the countries with the most significant progress narrowing the gender gap in recent years (Valentova et al, 2017; Elsevier Research Intelligence, 2020; Huang et al, 2020), and Life Sciences have reported a higher female participation in contrast to other scientific fields such as maths, physics, astronomy and computer science (Rossiter, 1997; Martin, 2012; McGuire et al, 2012; Bonham and Stefan, 2017; Wang and Degol, 2017; Holman et al, 2018; Salerno et al, 2019; Elsevier Research Intelligence, 2020). Recent analyses have shown that the increasing proportion of women in science has not led to a narrowing of the gender gap in terms of productivity, research impact, and career length (Wolfinger et al, 2009; Brooks et al, 2014; Cech and Blair-Loy, 2019; O’Brien et al, 2019; Huang et al, 2020; Rock et al, 2021)
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