Quantifying gender imbalance in East Asian academia: Research career and citation practice

Abstract

Gender imbalance in academia has been confirmed in terms of a variety of indicators, and its magnitude often varies from country to country. Europe and North America, which cover a large fraction of research workforce in the world, have been the main geographical regions for research on gender imbalance in academia. However, the academia in East Asia, which accounts for a substantial fraction of research, may be exposed to strong gender imbalance because Asia has been facing persistent and stronger gender imbalance in society at large than Europe and North America. Here we use publication data between 1950 and 2020 to analyze gender imbalance in academia in China, Japan, and South Korea in terms of the number of researchers, their career, and citation practice. We found that, compared to the average of the other countries, gender imbalance is larger in these three East Asian countries in terms of the number of researchers and their citation practice and additionally in Japan in terms of research career. Moreover, we found that Japan has been exposed to the larger gender imbalance than China and South Korea in terms of research career and citation practice.