Vicious circles of gender bias, lower positions, and lower performance: Gender differences in scholarly productivity and impact

Peter van den Besselaar and Ulf Sandström

PLOS ONE, 2017, vol. 12, issue 8, 1-16

Abstract: It is often argued that female researchers publish on average less than male researchers do, but male and female authored papers have an equal impact. In this paper we try to better understand this phenomenon by (i) comparing the share of male and female researchers within different productivity classes, and (ii) by comparing productivity whereas controlling for a series of relevant covariates. The study is based on a disambiguated Swedish author dataset, consisting of 47,000 researchers and their WoS-publications during the period of 2008-2011 with citations until 2015. As the analysis shows, in order to have impact quantity does make a difference for male and female researchers alike—but women are vastly underrepresented in the group of most productive researchers. We discuss and test several possible explanations of this finding, using a data on personal characteristics from several Swedish universities. Gender differences in age, authorship position, and academic rank do explain quite a part of the productivity differences.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0183301 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 83301&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0183301

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0183301

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().