Publications about Women, Science, and Engineering: Use of Sex and Gender in Titles over a Forty-six-year Period

This article focuses on key features of the use of sex and gender in titles of articles about women, science, and engineering over an important forty-six-year period (1965–2010). The focus is theoretically and empirically consequential. Theoretically, the paper addresses science as a critical case that connects femininity/masculinity to social stratification; and the use of sex and gender as an enduring, analytical issue that reveals perspectives on hierarchies of femininity/masculinity. Empirically, this article identifies the emergence, development, and stabilization of published articles about women, science, and engineering that use sex and gender in their titles. The distinctive method involves search, retrieval, and review of 23,430 articles, using intercoder reliabilities for inclusion/exclusion. This results in a uniquely specified and comprehensive set of articles on our subject and the identification of titles with sex and gender. Findings point to (1) the growth of gender titles, (2) their increase in every field, (3) differing concentrations of sex and gender titles in journals, (4) a span of telling topic areas, and (5) higher citation rates of gender, compared to sex, titles. Broader implications appear in reasons for the growth of gender titles, meanings of topic areas that occur, insights into social inequalities and science policies, and emerging complexities of nonbinary categories of sex/gender.

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Sex and gender analysis improves science and engineering

Nature ◽

10.1038/s41586-019-1657-6 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 575 (7781) ◽

pp. 137-146 ◽

Cited By ~ 60

Author(s):

Cara Tannenbaum ◽

Robert P. Ellis ◽

Friederike Eyssel ◽

James Zou ◽

Londa Schiebinger

Keyword(s):

Sex And Gender ◽

Gender Analysis ◽

Science And Engineering ◽

And Gender

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Political Sociology and the People's Health

10.1093/oso/9780190492472.001.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

Jason Beckfield ◽

Nancy Krieger

Keyword(s):

Population Health ◽

Social Stratification ◽

Social Life ◽

Social Inequalities ◽

Social Epidemiology ◽

Political Sociology ◽

Leading Edge ◽

Life And Death ◽

Advance Research ◽

And Gender

Health, illness, and death are distributed unequally around the world. Babies born in Japan can expect to live to age 80 or over, while babies born in Malawi can expect to die before the age of 50. As important, birth into one race, class, and gender within one society vs. another also matters enormously for one’s health. To answer such questions about social inequalities in health, Political Sociology and the People’s Health responds to two research trends that are motivating scholarship at the leading edge of inquiry into population health. First, social epidemiology is turning toward policy and politics to explain the unequal global distribution of population health. Second, social stratification research is turning toward new conceptualizations and theorizations of how institutions—the “rules of the game” that organize power in social life—distribute social goods, including health. Political Sociology and the People’s Health advances these two turns by developing new hypotheses that integrate insights from political sociology and social epidemiology. Political sociology offers a rich array of concepts, measures, and data that help social epidemiologists develop new hypotheses about how macroscopic factors like social policy, labor markets, and the racialized and gendered state shape the distribution of population health. Social epidemiology offers innovative approaches to the conceptualization and measurement of population, etiologic period, and distribution that can advance research on the relationships between institutions and inequalities. Developing the conversation between these fields, Political Sociology and the People’s Health describes how human institutional arrangements distribute life and death.

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