Gender differences in research areas and topics: An analysis of publications in 285 fields

09/04/2018
by   Mike Thelwall, et al.
0

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.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

research
04/02/2020

Mapping Three Decades of Intellectual Change in Academia

Research on the development of science has focused on the creation of mu...
research
08/30/2020

The prestige and status of research fields within mathematics

While the “hierarchy of science” has been widely analysed, there is no c...
research
09/05/2023

Gender Inequalities: Women Researchers Require More Knowledge in Specific and Experimental Topics

Gender inequalities in science have long been observed globally. Studies...
research
12/10/2018

Gender and Research Publishing in India: Uniformly high inequality?

Women's access to academic careers has been historically limited by disc...
research
08/22/2023

Does society show differential attention to researchers based on gender and field?

While not all researchers prioritize social impact, it is undeniably a c...
research
06/14/2020

Pot, kettle: Nonliteral titles aren't (natural) science

Researchers may be tempted to attract attention through poetic titles fo...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset