Disciplinary Field Specificity and Variation in the STEM Gender Gap

Sax, Linda J.; Newhouse, Kaitlin N. S.

doi:10.1002/ir.20275

Cited by 13 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…It has also been suggested that women are more likely to work in human-centered fields [50][51][52]. We can certainly observe corroboration of this hypothesis in our data, with CS education and HCI as the two fields with the highest FAR, followed by WWW and multimedia, which also put the human in the center of the research.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

Gender Differences in Collaboration Patterns in Computer Science

Yamamoto

Frachtenberg

2022

Publications

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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.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

Gender Differences in Collaboration Patterns in Computer Science

Yamamoto

Frachtenberg

2022

Publications

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“…Finally, we must take into account that different fields attract or retain women at different rates. For example, a number of studies posited that women are more likely to work in human-centered fields [76][77][78]. The higher FARs we observed in human-computer interaction and CS education appear to confirm this observation for CS fields.…”

Section: Related Worksupporting

confidence: 75%

Underrepresentation of women in computer systems research

Frachtenberg,

Kaner

2022

Preprint

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The gender gap in computer science (CS) research is a well-studied problem, with an estimated ratio of 15%-30% women researchers. However, far less is known about gender representation in specific fields within CS. Here, we investigate the gender gap in one large field, computer systems. To this end, we combined data from 53 leading systems conferences with external demographic and bibliometric data to evaluate the ratio of women authors and the factors that might affect this ratio.Our main findings are that women represent only about 10% of systems researchers, and that this ratio is not associated with various conference factors such as size, prestige, double-blind reviewing, and inclusivity policies. Author research experience also does not significantly affect this ratio, although author country and work sector do.The 10% ratio of women authors is significantly lower than that of CS as a whole. Our findings suggest that focusing on inclusivity policies alone cannot address this large gap. Increasing women's participation in systems research will require addressing the systemic causes of their exclusion, which are even more pronounced in systems than in the rest of CS.

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“…Finally, we must take into account that different fields attract or retain women at different rates. For example, a number of studies posited that women are more likely to work in human-centered fields [ 79 – 81 ]. The higher FARs we observed in human-computer interaction and CS education appear to confirm this observation for CS fields.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Underrepresentation of women in computer systems research

Frachtenberg

Kaner

2022

PLoS ONE

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The gender gap in computer science (CS) research is a well-studied problem, with an estimated ratio of 15%–30% women researchers. However, far less is known about gender representation in specific fields within CS. Here, we investigate the gender gap in one large field, computer systems. To this end, we collected data from 72 leading peer-reviewed CS conferences, totalling 6,949 accepted papers and 19,829 unique authors (2,946 women, 16,307 men, the rest unknown). We combined these data with external demographic and bibliometric data to evaluate the ratio of women authors and the factors that might affect this ratio. Our main findings are that women represent only about 10% of systems researchers, and that this ratio is not associated with various conference factors such as size, prestige, double-blind reviewing, and inclusivity policies. Author research experience also does not significantly affect this ratio, although author country and work sector do. The 10% ratio of women authors is significantly lower than the 16% in the rest of CS. Our findings suggest that focusing on inclusivity policies alone cannot address this large gap. Increasing women’s participation in systems research will require addressing the systemic causes of their exclusion, which are even more pronounced in systems than in the rest of CS.

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Disciplinary Field Specificity and Variation in the STEM Gender Gap

Cited by 13 publications

References 46 publications

Gender Differences in Collaboration Patterns in Computer Science

Gender Differences in Collaboration Patterns in Computer Science

Underrepresentation of women in computer systems research

Underrepresentation of women in computer systems research

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