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Gender disparities in Russian academia: a bibliometric analysis

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Abstract

The problem of gender disparities in various areas of society has long been well known and identified in most countries. Russian academia is no exception. This paper describes the representation of Russian men and women authors in terms of research production. The analysis is based on 121,953 papers with at least one Russian author, covered by Web of Science (WoS) and published between 2017 and 2019. The results demonstrate that there are still evident signs of gender disparities. Women remain underrepresented in their overall presence and performance almost in all disciplines and generally in academia. In all research fields, women’s mean number of publications is lower than analogous indicators for men. Although some areas have relative gender parity and even more women authors, the gap between both genders remains stable for most disciplines. As a result, despite some improvements in women’s research performance, Russian academia is the case, demonstrating that without a gender policy in both Russian political and science systems, it is complicated to eliminate gender inequality.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Professor Caroline Schlaufer for work on the general idea of the manuscript and to Victoria Loseva for helpful suggestions with regards to the data analysis. We also thank 18th ISSI Doctoral Forum participants for comments to the previous version of the study.

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The article was prepared within the framework of the HSE University Basic Research Program.

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  1. Doctoral School of Education, HSE University, 16 Potapovskiy Pereulok, Building 10, Moscow, Russia, 101000

    Marina Pilkina

  2. Center for Institutional Studies, HSE University, 11 Pokrovsky Boulevard, Moscow, Russia, 109028

    Andrey Lovakov

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  1. Marina Pilkina
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Correspondence to Marina Pilkina.

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Pilkina, M., Lovakov, A. Gender disparities in Russian academia: a bibliometric analysis. Scientometrics 127, 3577–3591 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04383-w

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