Quantitative evaluation of gender bias in astronomical publications from citation counts : Nature Astronomy
▻http://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-017-0141
Numerous studies across different research fields have shown that both male and female referees consistently give higher scores to work done by men than to identical work done by women. In addition, women are under-represented in prestigious publications and authorship positions and women receive ~10% fewer citations. In astronomy, similar biases have been measured in conference participation and success rates for telescope proposals. Even though the number of doctorate degrees awarded to women is constantly increasing, women still tend to be under-represented in faculty positions. Spurred by these findings, we measure the role of gender in the number of citations that papers receive in astronomy. To account for the fact that the properties of papers written by men and women differ intrinsically, we use a random forest algorithm to control for the non-gender-specific properties of these papers. Here we show that papers authored by women receive 10.4 ± 0.9% fewer citations than would be expected if the papers with the same non-gender-specific properties were written by men.
We consider a complete sample of >200,000 publications from 1950 to 2015 from five major astronomy journals:[…]
Figure 1: Ratio of mean number of citations for papers written by men to the mean number of citations for papers written by women.
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This difference is higher at earlier times, although the measurement is also more uncertain. Since 1985, this difference is roughly consistent at ~6%. The inset shows a zoom-in on the years 2000–2015.
Figure 2: Measured over predicted number of citations for papers authored by women.
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We measure an average intrinsic bias of ~10%, implying that women systematically receive ~10% fewer citations than would be expected if they were men given the non-gender-specific properties of their papers.