Getting ahead in the social sciences: How parenthood and publishing contribute to gender gaps in academic career advancement.

How do parenthood and publishing contribute to gender gaps in academic career advancement? While extensive research examines the causes of gender disparities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers, we know much less about the factors that constrain women's advancement in the social sciences. Combining detailed career- and administrative register data on 976 Danish social scientists in Business and Management, Economics, Political Science, Psychology, and Sociology (5703 person-years) that obtained a PhD degree between 2000 and 2015, we estimate gender differences in attainment of senior research positions and parse out how publication outputs, parenthood and parental leave contribute to these differences. Our approach is advantageous over previous longitudinal studies in that we track the careers and publication outputs of graduates from the outset of their PhD education and match this data with time-sensitive information on each individual's publication activities and family situation. In discrete time-event history models, we observe a ∼24 per cent female disadvantage in advancement likelihoods within the first 7 years after PhD graduation, with gender differences increasing over the observation period. A decomposition indicates that variations in publishing, parenthood and parental leave account for ∼ 40 per cent of the gender gap in career advancement, suggesting that other factors, including recruitment disparities, asymmetries in social capital and experiences of unequal treatment at work, may also constrain women's careers.

A framework for sex, gender, and diversity analysis in research.

Funding agencies have ample room to improve their policies.

Author-level data confirm the widening gender gap in publishing rates during COVID-19.

Publications are essential for a successful academic career, and there is evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic has amplified existing gender disparities in the publishing process. We used longitudinal publication data on 431,207 authors in four disciplines - basic medicine, biology, chemistry and clinical medicine - to quantify the differential impact of COVID-19 on the annual publishing rates of men and women. In a difference-in-differences analysis, we estimated that the average gender difference in publication productivity increased from -0.26 in 2019 to -0.35 in 2020; this corresponds to the output of women being 17% lower than the output of men in 2109, and 24% lower in 2020. An age-group comparison showed a widening gender gap for both early-career and mid-career scientists. The increasing gender gap was most pronounced among highly productive authors and in biology and clinical medicine. Our study demonstrates the importance of reinforcing institutional commitments to diversity through policies that support the inclusion and retention of women in research.

The Societal Readiness Thinking Tool: A Practical Resource for Maturing the Societal Readiness of Research Projects.

In this paper, we introduce the Societal Readiness (SR) Thinking Tool to aid researchers and innovators in developing research projects with greater responsiveness to societal values, needs, and expectations. The need for societally-focused approaches to research and innovation-complementary to Technology Readiness (TR) frameworks-is presented. Insights from responsible research and innovation (RRI) concepts and practice, organized across critical stages of project-life cycles are discussed with reference to the development of the SR Thinking Tool. The tool is designed to complement not only shortfalls in TR approaches, but also improve upon other efforts to integrate RRI, sustainability, and design thinking in research and innovation cycles. Operationalization and early-stage user tests of the Tool are reported, along with discussion of potential future iterations and applications.

Lack of consideration of sex and gender in COVID-19 clinical studies.

Sex and gender differences impact the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 mortality. Furthermore, sex differences influence the frequency and severity of pharmacological side effects. A large number of clinical trials to develop new therapeutic approaches and vaccines for COVID-19 are ongoing. We investigated the inclusion of sex and/or gender in COVID-19 studies on ClinicalTrials.gov, collecting data for the period January 1, 2020 to January 26, 2021. Here, we show that of the 4,420 registered SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 studies, 935 (21.2%) address sex/gender solely in the context of recruitment, 237 (5.4%) plan sex-matched or representative samples or emphasized sex/gender reporting, and only 178 (4%) explicitly report a plan to include sex/gender as an analytical variable. Just eight (17.8%) of the 45 COVID-19 related clinical trials published in scientific journals until December 15, 2020 report sex-disaggregated results or subgroup analyses.

Weak evidence of country- and institution-related status bias in the peer review of abstracts.

Research suggests that scientists based at prestigious institutions receive more credit for their work than scientists based at less prestigious institutions, as do scientists working in certain countries. We examined the extent to which country- and institution-related status signals drive such differences in scientific recognition. In a preregistered survey experiment, we asked 4,147 scientists from six disciplines (astronomy, cardiology, materials science, political science, psychology and public health) to rate abstracts that varied on two factors: (i) author country (high status vs lower status in science); (ii) author institution (high status vs lower status university). We found only weak evidence of country- or institution-related status bias, and mixed regression models with discipline as random-effect parameter indicated that any plausible bias not detected by our study must be small in size.

Global citation inequality is on the rise.

Citations are important building blocks for status and success in science. We used a linked dataset of more than 4 million authors and 26 million scientific papers to quantify trends in cumulative citation inequality and concentration at the author level. Our analysis, which spans 15 y and 118 scientific disciplines, suggests that a small stratum of elite scientists accrues increasing citation shares and that citation inequality is on the rise across the natural sciences, medical sciences, and agricultural sciences. The rise in citation concentration has coincided with a general inclination toward more collaboration. While increasing collaboration and full-count publication rates go hand in hand for the top 1% most cited, ordinary scientists are engaging in more and larger collaborations over time, but publishing slightly less. Moreover, fractionalized publication rates are generally on the decline, but the top 1% most cited have seen larger increases in coauthored papers and smaller relative decreases in fractional-count publication rates than scientists in the lower percentiles of the citation distribution. Taken together, these trends have enabled the top 1% to extend its share of fractional- and full-count publications and citations. Further analysis shows that top-cited scientists increasingly reside in high-ranking universities in western Europe and Australasia, while the United States has seen a slight decline in elite concentration. Our findings align with recent evidence suggesting intensified international competition and widening author-level disparities in science.

COVID-19 medical papers have fewer women first authors than expected.

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in school closures and distancing requirements that have disrupted both work and family life for many. Concerns exist that these disruptions caused by the pandemic may not have influenced men and women researchers equally. Many medical journals have published papers on the pandemic, which were generated by researchers facing the challenges of these disruptions. Here we report the results of an analysis that compared the gender distribution of authors on 1893 medical papers related to the pandemic with that on papers published in the same journals in 2019, for papers with first authors and last authors from the United States. Using mixed-effects regression models, we estimated that the proportion of COVID-19 papers with a woman first author was 19% lower than that for papers published in the same journals in 2019, while our comparisons for last authors and overall proportion of women authors per paper were inconclusive. A closer examination suggested that women's representation as first authors of COVID-19 research was particularly low for papers published in March and April 2020. Our findings are consistent with the idea that the research productivity of women, especially early-career women, has been affected more than the research productivity of men.

Gender variations in citation distributions in medicine are very small and due to self-citation and journal prestige.

A number of studies suggest that scientific papers with women in leading-author positions attract fewer citations than those with men in leading-author positions. We report the results of a matched case-control study of 1,269,542 papers in selected areas of medicine published between 2008 and 2014. We find that papers with female authors are, on average, cited between 6.5 and 12.6% less than papers with male authors. However, the standardized mean differences are very small, and the percentage overlaps between the distributions for male and female authors are extensive. Adjusting for self-citations, number of authors, international collaboration and journal prestige, we find near-identical per-paper citation impact for women and men in first and last author positions, with self-citations and journal prestige accounting for most of the small average differences. Our study demonstrates the importance of focusing greater attention on within-group variability and between-group overlap of distributions when interpreting and reporting results of gender-based comparisons of citation impact.

Making gender diversity work for scientific discovery and innovation.

Gender diversity has the potential to drive scientific discovery and innovation. Here, we distinguish three approaches to gender diversity: diversity in research teams, diversity in research methods and diversity in research questions. While gender diversity is commonly understood to refer only to the gender composition of research teams, fully realizing the potential of diversity for science and innovation also requires attention to the methods employed and questions raised in scientific knowledge-making. We provide a framework for understanding the best ways to support the three approaches to gender diversity across four interdependent domains - from research teams to the broader disciplines in which they are embedded to research organizations and ultimately to the different societies that shape them through specific gender norms and policies. Our analysis demonstrates that realizing the benefits of diversity for science requires careful management of these four interdependent domains.

One and a half million medical papers reveal a link between author gender and attention to gender and sex analysis.

Gender and sex analysis is increasingly recognized as a key factor in creating better medical research and health care 1-7 . Using a sample of more than 1.5 million medical research papers, our study examined the potential link between women's participation in medical science and attention to gender-related and sex-related factors in disease-specific research. Adjusting for variations across countries, disease topics and medical research areas, we compared the participation of women authors in studies that do and do not involve gender and sex analysis. Overall, our results show a robust positive correlation between women's authorship and the likelihood of a study including gender and sex analysis. These findings corroborate discussions of how women's participation in medical science links to research outcomes, and show the mutual benefits of promoting both the scientific advancement of women and the integration of gender and sex analysis into medical research.