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Gender differences in performance of top cited scientists by field and country

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Abstract

In this descriptive study, we aim to show the potential gender differences in academic success, focusing on the top (i.e., most frequently cited) scientists by analyzing the work of more than 94,000 scientists in 21 fields across 43 countries. Our results indicate that female representation in the top tier of scientists strongly varies between countries (11.83%; s.d. = 0.046), with the highest proportion of top women scientists in Finland (20.45%) and the lowest in Saudi Arabia (2.08%). Compared with the total share of females in science, women are underrepresented among the top (i.e., most frequently cited) scholars by 28.52 percentage points. The proportions differ by disciplines, with top women authors best represented in Public Health and Services (36.1%), Communication and Textual Studies (33.7%), Psychology and Cognitive Science (27.5%), and Social Sciences (23%); while the lowest share of women scientists are found in Mathematics and Statistics (6.3%), Engineering (7.2%), and Physics and Astronomy (7.7%). However, despite the low female representation, top women scholars in those three fields conduct (on average) more impactful research than their male colleagues, which is contrary to most other research fields. We also show that female scientific success is positively correlated with a nation’s higher gender equity indicators, lower discriminatory values, and less negative attitudes and preferences towards women. Overall, our findings suggest that scientific fields are still struggling with gender inequality that pervades public life.

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Data availability

Extended data is available for this paper at https://osf.io/5dhpm/.

Notes

  1. https://www.aeaweb.org/about-aea/committees/cswep/about.

  2. https://www.apa.org/pi/women/committee/index.

  3. https://www.asanet.org/about-asa/governance/committees-and-task-forces/committee-status-women-sociology.

  4. https://www.aps.org/programs/education/su4w/index.cfm.

  5. https://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5383.

  6. https://www.unesco.org/new/en/unesco-liaison-office-in-new-york/about-this-office/single-view/news/unesco_roundtable_on_gender_gap_in_science_technology_and_i/.

  7. https://research.assaf.org.za/bitstream/handle/20.500.11911/113/2018_genderinsite_pathway_success.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y.

  8. https://genderinsite.net/about/who-we-are.

  9. Field values are subject to some double counts as some scholars are allocated to more than one field.

  10. However, in an interesting study conducted by Thelwall (2020a) on mid-career switches, females in STEM careers are less likely to leave STEM careers than females in other professional fields. Thus, except for immunology and microbiology, STEM fields have a net female gain as female researchers switching fields tend to move to fields with fewer women.

  11. https://info.ils.indiana.edu/gender/index.php.

  12. Papers classified by Scopus as Articles, Reviews, or Conference Papers, published from 1960 to 2017.

  13. All research impact and credit allocation measures exclude self-citations.

  14. See Supporting Materials and Methods for data on estimates of the number of researchers in the higher education sector in each country.

  15. In addition, we also find that the correlation between share of top women authors are correlated with the share of authorships in high-quality Nature Index journals (Pearson’s r = 0.37, P = 0.041, n = 31, Bendels et al., 2018a, b) and among publications in PubMed and arXiv databases (Pearson’s r = 0.384, P = 0.011, n = 43, Holman et al. 2018).

  16. Gender Studies is another subfield with more women than men top scientists (84%), however, only 13 authors from this area are listed in the top 100,000 scientists.

  17. Using individual two sample t-tests, we find that the mean first year of publication of male scientists is statistically smaller (α = 0.05) than that of female in 67 out of 149 subfields.

  18. We caution the readers to carefully interpret findings regarding co-authorship patterns, as norms and culture differ across fields; for example, alphabetical ordering is common in some fields and not others (Henriksen 2019; Ong et al. 2018).

  19. E.g., gender difference in self-selecting to publish in non-English national journals.

  20. For instance, if citation ranking is normalized by field and/or country, one could examine the pattern in gender difference with sample of top-scientists equally representing the top percentile in each field or country.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC), DP180101169. We would like to thank the reviewers for their thoughtful suggestions towards improving our manuscript. Tong Li, Weilong Bi, and Nikita Ferguson provided excellent research assistant.

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  1. Ho Fai Chan and Benno Torgler have contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Economics and Finance, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia

    Ho Fai Chan & Benno Torgler

  2. Centre for Behavioural Economics, Society and Technology, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia

    Ho Fai Chan & Benno Torgler

  3. CREMA – Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts, 8008, Zurich, Switzerland

    Benno Torgler

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  1. Ho Fai Chan
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  2. Benno Torgler
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HFC and BT contributed to the conception, design, and analysis of the study, as well as writing of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Ho Fai Chan or Benno Torgler.

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Chan, H.F., Torgler, B. Gender differences in performance of top cited scientists by field and country. Scientometrics 125, 2421–2447 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03733-w

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