Gender differences in research areas, methods and topics: Can people and thing orientations explain the results?

Abstract

Although the gender gap in academia has narrowed, females are underrepresented within some fields in the USA. Prior research suggests that the imbalances between science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields may be partly due to greater male interest in things and greater female interest in people, or to off-putting masculine cultures in some disciplines. To seek more detailed insights across all subjects, this article compares practising US male and female researchers between and within 285 narrow Scopus fields inside 26 broad fields from their first-authored articles published in 2017. The comparison is based on publishing fields and the words used in article titles, abstracts, and keywords. The results cannot be fully explained by the people/thing dimensions. Exceptions include greater female interest in veterinary science and cell biology and greater male interest in abstraction, patients, and power/control fields, such as politics and law. These may be due to other factors, such as the ability of a career to provide status or social impact or the availability of alternative careers. As a possible side effect of the partial people/thing relationship, females are more likely to use exploratory and qualitative methods and males are more likely to use quantitative methods. The results suggest that the necessary steps of eliminating explicit and implicit gender bias in academia are insufficient and might be complemented by measures to make fields more attractive to minority genders.

Female citation impact superiority 1996–2018 in six out of seven English‐speaking nations

“…Despite formal gender equality in employment being half a century old in many countries (e.g., the US Civil Rights Act of 1964; the UK Sex Discrimination Act 1975), females have not yet achieved parity in academia in most countries (Larivière, Ni, Gingras, Cronin, & Sugimoto, 2013). Current imbalances include fewer females overall (Shannon, Jansen, Williams, Cáceres, Motta, et al, 2019) and in most fields (Thelwall, Bailey, Makita, Sud, & Madalli, 2019;Thelwall, Bailey, Tobin, & Bradshaw, 2019) as well as even lower proportions of females in promoted posts (e.g., Bosquet, Combes, & García-Peñalosa, 2018). Gender imbalances seem to be decreasing (e.g., Winchester & Browning, 2015) but are an ongoing concern and may not disappear in our lifetimes (Holman, Stuart-Fox, & Hauser, 2018).…”

No evidence of citation bias as a determinant of STEM gender disparities in US biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology research

“…Articles published 2015-18 were excluded from the citation analysis component because several years are needed for citation counts to stabilise and shrink within-year citation differentials (de Araújo, de Oliveira, de Oliveira Brito, et al, 2012). First and last author genders were detected using a list of gendered first names that has an error rate of 1.5% on US academics but leaves some genders unknown and overestimates the proportion of females by 1% (based on comparisons with human-checked data in: Thelwall et al, 2019). Articles with either the first or last author gender unknown were removed.…”

“…Female underrepresentation in Science Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects continues in the USA despite girls outperforming boys in academic grades (O 'Dea, Lagisz, Jennions, & Nakagawa, 2018) and female majorities elsewhere for faculty (NCES 2019) and publishing (Elsevier, 2017;Thelwall, Bailey, Tobin, & Bradshaw, 2019). The life sciences are an important STEM exception, however (Sax, Lim, Lehman, & Lonje-Paulson, 2018).…”

Briefing: US environmental science women are high-impact team players

“…The gender of the first and last author was guessed by matching their first name, when reported, to a list of first names commonly used by males or females in the USA, as reported in census data and by genderapi.com. Testing on human checked academic authors from 2017 from another paper (Thelwall, Bailey, Tobin, & Bradshaw, 2019) shows that this method has an accuracy of 98.5% but leaves some authors unclassified and tends to overestimate females by 0.5%. Articles were excluded if the gender of the first or last author could not be detected.…”

“…For US firstauthored research in 2017, Environmental Science was the 12 th most female subject out of 26, with a male majority in all specialist fields. This varied from 0.43 females per male in Water Science & Technology to 0.52 females per male in Health, Toxicology & Mutagenesis (Thelwall, Bailey, Tobin, and Bradshaw, 2019). Environmental science seems to be rarely singled out for Science Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) initiatives to promote female participation, presumably because other subjects are in a worse situation, but there are partial exceptions (Horner-Devine, Yen, Mody-Pan, Margherio, and Forde, 2016;Thornbush, 2016).…”