Researchers are more likely to write scientific papers with co-authors of the same gender, a pattern that can鈥檛 be explained by varying gender representations across scientific disciplines and time.
A new study from the 91探花 and Cornell University, recently published in , finds consistent gender homophily 鈥� the tendency of authors to collaborate with others who share their gender 鈥� in a digital collection of 560,000 published research articles over a 50-year period. While this observation is not new, researchers also used novel methods to rule out seemingly logical explanations for the pattern, such as a field鈥檚 gender balance or authorship norms for writing research papers.
The findings suggest a behavioral component is in play when scientists seek out collaborators.
鈥淩esearchers use social discretion when choosing their collaborators,鈥� said , co-author and associate professor of philosophy at the UW.听鈥淒o they express this by choosing same-gender co-authorship teams? How can we study this at a scale that includes multiple fields while also respecting听the diversity of authorship demographics and practices at finer-grained levels?”
The research team, comprised of scholars in statistics, information science, biology and philosophy, mined articles published between 1960 and 2011 from the online repository JSTOR. To help link genders to more than 800,000 author names, the team relied on social security records and crowdsourced data. Because of limitations in the data, this research was restricted to those who identify as men and women and didn鈥檛 include nonbinary and intersex identities.
The team then grouped authors from the same fields and eras, creating 50,000 hypothetical reconfigurations of authors.
鈥淲e re-simulated hypothetical datasets. Our thinking was: How different is what we actually observed versus these hypothetical scenarios that we constructed,鈥� said听, co-author and assistant professor at Cornell who was a doctoral student in statistics at the 91探花when he started this research. 鈥淰ery different, it turns out. This suggests that some other source of homophily is occurring in the data we observed.鈥�
The team can鈥檛 say definitively why researchers tend to collaborate with those of the same gender. Data science methods can鈥檛 measure intent, but Wang said the findings suggest consideration of gender may be a factor.
Other co-authors from the 91探花were , associate professor in the 91探花Information School; , professor of biology; and , professor of statistics and of social work. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the 91探花Royalty Research Fund.听
Adapted from a Cornell University press release.
For more information, contact Lee at c3@uw.edu and Erosheva at erosheva@uw.edu.