scholarly journals Examining gender imbalance in chemistry authorship

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam D. Cotton ◽  
Ian B. Seiple

AbstractThe gender gap in chemistry has been the topic of much debate, with many perspectives stating that the field has improved, and outdated sexist views are behind us. While these views are common, we wanted to assess the accuracy of these comments from a data-driven perspective. In this study, we use PubMed to obtain the names of first and last authors for every paper published since 2005 across 15 journals. Each name was cross-referenced with a name-based gender API to give a predicted binary gender and a confidence score based on population data. We show that historically there has been an extensive overrepresentation of men in both first and corresponding authorship, and that there is no strong trend towards parity since 2005. We demonstrate that papers with female corresponding authors have more equitable gender representation of first authors. Finally, we find that there is significant variability among journals in the gender make-up of their editorial boards. We hope this analysis spurs creative discussions on how we can improve equitable gender representation in chemistry publications.

2020 ◽  
pp. 54-62
Author(s):  
Oleksii V. Lyulyov ◽  
Oleksandra I. Karintseva ◽  
Andrii V. Yevdokymov ◽  
Hanna S. Ponomarova ◽  
Oleksandr O. Ivanov

The article describes the situation of gender equality in Ukraine and in the world during the last 5 years, identifies the leading countries in moving towards gender equality in various fields of life by analyzing the indicators of the Global Gender Gap Report of the World Economic Forum. These indicators include: Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, Political Empowerment, which are the part of a single index that determines the position of countries in the overall ranking. Based on the results of this analysis, Ukraine has improved value of gender equality index, although in the overall ranking of countries Ukraine has lost its position and dropped 11 ranks lower than in 2014. This means that, among all the countries surveyed by the World Economic Forum, there are countries that are moving much faster towards gender equality than Ukraine. In addition, the article includes the investigation of the gender representation among the board members of 5 enterprises of Ukraine for 2014-2017, which represent the leading sectors of the Ukrainian economy. The dynamics of changes in the level of performance of these enterprises using the return on assets (ROA) indicator is analyzed, the relationship between the leadership of the enterprises and the value of the ROA indicator is graphically presented. The obtained results do not give a clear answer about the gender impact on the enterprise performance. The reason for this is a number of factors, such as: insufficient statistical sampling of enterprises; the selected performance indicator of enterprise activities does not fully reflect the impact of the gender factor on enterprise activities; the methodology used in the work needs improvements, or it is necessary to choose a totally new approach to the analysis of the investigated issue under study. Gender representation among board members and its impact on enterprise performance should be investigated further. Key words: gender, gender equality, enterprise board members, return on assets.


Author(s):  
Patrik Puchert ◽  
Pedro Hermosilla ◽  
Tobias Ritschel ◽  
Timo Ropinski

AbstractDensity estimation plays a crucial role in many data analysis tasks, as it infers a continuous probability density function (PDF) from discrete samples. Thus, it is used in tasks as diverse as analyzing population data, spatial locations in 2D sensor readings, or reconstructing scenes from 3D scans. In this paper, we introduce a learned, data-driven deep density estimation (DDE) to infer PDFs in an accurate and efficient manner, while being independent of domain dimensionality or sample size. Furthermore, we do not require access to the original PDF during estimation, neither in parametric form, nor as priors, or in the form of many samples. This is enabled by training an unstructured convolutional neural network on an infinite stream of synthetic PDFs, as unbound amounts of synthetic training data generalize better across a deck of natural PDFs than any natural finite training data will do. Thus, we hope that our publicly available DDE method will be beneficial in many areas of data analysis, where continuous models are to be estimated from discrete observations.


2021 ◽  
Vol 118 (42) ◽  
pp. e2108337118
Author(s):  
Joyce C. He ◽  
Sonia K. Kang ◽  
Nicola Lacetera

Research shows that women are less likely to enter competitions than men. This disparity may translate into a gender imbalance in holding leadership positions or ascending in organizations. We provide both laboratory and field experimental evidence that this difference can be attenuated with a default nudge—changing the choice to enter a competitive task from a default in which applicants must actively choose to compete to a default in which applicants are automatically enrolled in competition but can choose to opt out. Changing the default affects the perception of prevailing social norms about gender and competition as well as perceptions of the performance or ability threshold at which to apply. We do not find associated negative effects for performance or wellbeing. These results suggest that organizations could make use of opt-out promotion schemes to reduce the gender gap in competition and support the ascension of women to leadership positions.


Author(s):  
Ankica Sobot

In this paper, population challenges are recognized from the perspective of various demographic structures of the male and female population. The larger scope of female population in Vojvodina is mainly the result of a more emphasized gender imbalance among the population of 65 or over. There are more unmarried females but more males among the never-married persons. Among the middle-aged population, there are more women with higher education, but they are also economically independent to a greater extent than the male population. Gender equality is a challenge as a factor of demographic processes and as an aspect of policies directed towards the population, but adequate responses for demographic development and social care of the population are implied by both male and female positions. By comparative approach, the characteristics of gender positions and differences in Vojvodina are noted, as well as the space for promoting positions of sexes and mitigation of the gender gap. The necessity for a deeper socio-demographic analysis and empirical research of gender differences as a relevant population challenge are also noted. .


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Jimena Grosso ◽  
Jessica Fratani ◽  
Gabriela Fontanarrosa ◽  
Mariana Chuliver ◽  
Ana Sofía Duport-Bru ◽  
...  

Abstract The growing number of gender studies encourages more refined analyzes and greater conceptualization of the underlying processes of gender gap in science. In Herpetology, previous studies have described gender disparities and a scrutiny of individual interactions may help revealing the mechanisms modelling the global pattern. In this contribution we modeled a co-authorship network, a previously unexplored methodology for gender studies in this discipline, in addition to a broad and classic bibliometric analysis of the discipline. Co-authorship networks were modelled for two South American journals, because this geo-political location is considered to present the best gender balance within general scientific communities. However, we found a pattern of male preferential connections (male homophily) that marginalizes women and maintains the gender gap, at both regional and global scales. This interpretation arises from results coming from multiple analyses, such as high homophily index in collaboration networks, lower female representation in articles than expected in a non-gender biased environment, the decrease of female co-authors when the article leader is a man, and the extreme masculinization of the editorial boards. The homophilic dynamics of the publication process reveals that academic activity is pervasive to unbalanced power relationships. Personal interactions shape the collective experience, tracing back to the Feminist Theory’s axiom: “the personal is political”.


The Lancet ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 393 (10171) ◽  
pp. 521-523 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jyoti S Mathad ◽  
Lindsey K Reif ◽  
Grace Seo ◽  
Kathleen F Walsh ◽  
Margaret L McNairy ◽  
...  

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-113
Author(s):  
Michelle L. Dion ◽  
Sara McLaughlin Mitchell

ABSTRACTRecent studies identified gendered citation gaps in political science journal articles, with male scholars being less likely to cite work by female scholars in comparison to their female peers. Although journal editors, editorial boards, and political scientists are becoming more aware of implicit biases and adopting strategies to remedy them, we know less about the proper baselines for citations in subfields and research areas of political science. Without information about how many women should be cited in a research field, it is difficult to know whether the distribution is biased. Using the gender distribution of membership in professional political science organizations and article authors in 38 political science journals, we provide scholars with suggested minimum baselines for gender representation in citations. We also show that women represent a larger share of organization members than the authors in sponsoring organizations’ journals.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle L. Dion ◽  
Sara McLaughlin Mitchell

Recent studies have identified gendered citation gaps in political science journal articles, with male scholars being less likely to cite work by female scholars in comparison to their female peers. While journal editors, editorial boards, and political scientists are becoming more aware of implicit biases and adopting strategies to remedy them, we know less about the proper baselines for citations in subfields and research areas of political science. Without information about how many women should be cited in a research field, it is difficult to know whether the distribution is biased. Using the gender distribution of membership in professional political science organizations and of article authors in 38 political science journals, we provide scholars with baselines for gender representation in citations. We also show that women represent a larger share of organization members than the authors in sponsoring organizations’ journals.


Author(s):  
Flavia D. Freidenberg

This article reflects about the weight women have had in the field of Political Science in and about Latin America during the last decade. This text not only describes and analyzes the existing gender gap in compared research about Latin America, but also it focuses the attention in how the discipline as a profession is exercised. The main objective of this paper is to generate initial reflections about of the status of women in the discipline in Latin America as well as how we do research, what we teach and what we publish (and with whom) in the discipline. The women are underrepresented in Political Science meetings, syllabi, and editorial boards. This is done under the premise that Political Science is a gendered discipline that reproduces exclusionary views, beliefs, and practices and also operates under a certain level of “gender blindness”


2021 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. E6
Author(s):  
Marta Pastor-Cabeza ◽  
Ramon Torné ◽  
Roser García-Armengol ◽  
Belén Menéndez-Osorio ◽  
Alejandra Mosteiro-Cadaval ◽  
...  

OBJECTIVEThe percentage of women publishing high-impact neurosurgical research might be perceived as a representation of our specialty and may influence the perpetuation of the existing gender gap. This study investigated whether the trend in women taking lead roles in neurosurgical research has mirrored the increase in female neurosurgeons during the past decade and whether our most prestigious publications portray enough female role models to stimulate gender diversity among the new generation of neurosurgeons.METHODSTwo of the most prominent neurosurgical journals—Journal of Neurosurgery and Neurosurgery—were selected for this study, and every original article that was published in 2009 and 2019 in each of those journals was investigated according to the gender of the first and senior authors, their academic titles, their affiliations, and their institutions’ region.RESULTSA total of 1328 articles were analyzed. The percentage of female authors was significantly higher in Europe and Russia compared with the US and Canada (first authors: 60/302 [19.9%] vs 109/829 [13.1%], p = 0.005; and senior authors: 32/302 [10.6%] vs 57/829 [6.9%], p = 0.040). Significantly increased female authorship was observed from 2009 to 2019, and overall numbers of both first and senior female authors almost doubled. However, when analyzing by regions, female authorship increased significantly only in the US and Canada. Female authors of neurosurgical research articles were significantly less likely to hold an MD degree compared with men. Female neurosurgeons serving as senior authors were represented in only 3.6% (48/1328) of articles. Women serving as senior authors were more likely to have a female colleague listed as the first author of their research (29/97 [29.9%] vs 155/1231 [12.6%]; χ2 = 22.561, p = 0.001).CONCLUSIONSAlthough this work showed an encouraging increase in the number of women publishing high-impact neurosurgical research, the stagnant trend in Europe may suggest that a glass ceiling has been reached and further advances in equity would require more aggressive measures. The differences in the researchers’ profiles (academic title and affiliation) suggest an even wider gender gap. Cultural unconscious bias may explain why female senior authors have more than double the number of women serving as their junior authors compared with men. While changes in the workforce happen, strategies such as publishing specific issues on women, encouraging female editorials, and working toward more gender-balanced editorial boards may help our journals to portray a more equitable specialty that would not discourage bright female candidates.


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