Abstract
Evidence suggests that women in academia are hindered by conscious and unconscious biases, and often feel excluded from formal and informal opportunities for research collaboration. In addition to ensuring fairness and helping to redress gender imbalance in the academic workforce, increasing women’s access to collaboration could help scientific progress by drawing on more of the available human capital. Here, we test whether researchers tend to collaborate with same-gendered colleagues, using more stringent methods and a larger dataset than in past work. Our results reaffirm that researchers co-publish with colleagues of the same gender more often than expected by chance, and show that this ‘gender homophily’ is slightly stronger today than it was 10 years ago. Contrary to our expectations, we found no evidence that homophily is driven mostly by senior academics, and no evidence that homophily is stronger in fields where women are in the minority. Interestingly, journals with a high impact factor for their discipline tended to have comparatively low homophily, as predicted if mixed-gender teams produce better research. We discuss some potential causes of gender homophily in science.
Highlights
Women are severely underrepresented in many branches of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM), and face additional challenges and inequities relative to men [1,2,3,4,5]
Most journals had positive values of α0 (77-92%, depending on time period and author type; S1 Data), and for many of these the false discovery rate (FDR)-corrected p-values suggested that α0 was significantly greater than zero (1469/2077 journals were significant in 2015-16, and 404/1192 in 2005-6; S1 Data)
The values of α0 calculated for each journal-country combination were only very slightly lower than the α0 values calculated for the journal as a whole: on average, the difference in α0 was only 0.002 (S7 Fig). These results suggest that our findings of widespread homophily in the main analysis were not driven solely by a Wahlund effect resulting from gender differences between countries
Summary
Women are severely underrepresented in many branches of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM), and face additional challenges and inequities relative to men [1,2,3,4,5]. Women occupy more junior positions [6, 7] with lower salaries [8, 9], receive less grant money [10, 11], are promoted more slowly [12,13,14,15], and are allocated fewer resources [16] and less research funding [17,18,19]. Studies have concluded that women tend to be less involved in international collaboration [19, 28, 30,31,32], collaborate less within their own university departments [31], have less prestigious collaborations [33], and fewer collaborations.
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