Biases against women in the workplace have been documented in a variety of studies. This paper presents a large scale study on gender bias, where we compare acceptance rates of contributions from men versus women in an open source software community. Surprisingly, our results show that women’s contributions tend to be accepted more often than men’s. However, for contributors who are outsiders to a project and their gender is identifiable, men’s acceptance rates are higher. Our results suggest that although women on GitHub may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless.
Women are credited less in science than men
Abstract There is a well-documented gap between the observed number of works produced by women and by men in science, with clear consequences for the retention and promotion of women 1 . The gap might be a result of productivity differences 2–5 , or it might be owing to women’s contributions not being acknowledged 6,7 . Here we find that at least part of this gap is the result of unacknowledged contributions: women in research teams are significantly less likely than men to be credited with authorship. The findings are consistent across three very different sources of data. Analysis of the first source—large-scale administrative data on research teams, team scientific output and attribution of credit—show that women are significantly less likely to be named on a given article or patent produced by their team relative to their male peers. The gender gap in attribution is present across most scientific fields and almost all career stages. The second source—an extensive survey of authors—similarly shows that women’s scientific contributions are systematically less likely to be recognized. The third source—qualitative responses—suggests that the reason that women are less likely to be credited is because their work is often not known, is not appreciated or is ignored. At least some of the observed gender gap in scientific output may be owing not to differences in scientific contribution, but rather to differences in attribution.
more »
« less
- PAR ID:
- 10358589
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Nature
- Volume:
- 608
- Issue:
- 7921
- ISSN:
- 0028-0836
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 135 to 145
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
more » « less
-
Global and team science approaches are on the rise, as is attention to the network underpinnings of gender disparities in scientific collaboration. Many network studies of men’s and women’s collaboration rely on bounded case studies of single disciplines and/or single countries and limited measures related to the collaborative process. We deploy network analysis on the scholarly database Scopus to gain insight into gender inequity across regions and subject areas and to better understand contextual underpinnings of stagnancy. Using a dataset of over 1.2 million authors and 144 million collaborative relationships, we capture international and unbounded co-authorship networks that include intra- and inter-disciplinary co-authorship ties across time (2009–2013). We describe how gender informs structural features and status differences in network relationships, focusing on men and women authors in 16 region-subject pairs. We pay particular attention to how connected authors are (first- and second-order degree centrality), attributes of authors’ collaborative relationships (including the “quality” and other characteristics of these ties), tendencies towards gender homophily (proportion of same-gender ties), and the nature of men’s and women’s interdisciplinary and international reach. Men have more advantageous first-order connections, yet second-order collaborative profiles look more similar. Men and women exhibit homophilous attachment to authors of the same gender, consistent over time. There is notable variation in the level of gender disparity within subjects across countries. We discuss this variation in the context of global trends in men’s and women’s scientific participation and cultural- and country-level influences on the organization and production of science.more » « less
-
more » « less
Women experience higher morbidity than men, despite living longer. This is often attributed to biological differences between the sexes; however, the majority of societies in which these disparities are observed exhibit gender norms that favor men. We tested the hypothesis that female-biased gender norms ameliorate gender disparities in health by comparing gender differences in inflammation and hypertension among the matrilineal and patrilineal Mosuo of China. Widely reported gender disparities in health were reversed among matrilineal Mosuo compared with patrilineal Mosuo, due to substantial improvements in women’s health, with no concomitant detrimental effects on men. These findings offer evidence that gender norms limiting women’s autonomy and biasing inheritance toward men adversely affect the health of women, increasing women’s risk for chronic diseases with tremendous global health impact.
-
Gendered differences in academic confidence and self-efficacy between men and women are well-documented. In STEM fields and specifically in engineering, such differences have important consequences in that students low on these constructs are often more prone to leave their degree programs. While this evidence base is fairly established, less is known about the extent to which men and women show differences in confidence of team success, or collective efficacy, which may also be consequential in decisions to join and persist in design team experiences, or even to stay in or leave an engineering major, especially for first-year students. In this analysis, we quantitatively investigated gendered differences in confidence of team success and collective efficacy among first-year engineering students working on semester-long design projects in stable teams. Using a software tool built to support equitable teamwork, survey data on team confidence and collective efficacy was collected for these engineering students as well as for students in other courses for the sake of comparison. Three hierarchical linear models were fit to the data from 1,806 students across 31 unique course/term combinations. The results were mixed. In two of these analyses, we identified significant interactions between gender and team confidence. Specifically, men generally reported higher team confidence scores than women throughout the term with women eventually catching up, and team confidence ratings increased for men but not women following a lesson on imposter syndrome. No gendered differences were observed with respect to a collective efficacy scale administered near the middle and end of the term, however. In all cases, the results were consistent across course type (engineering, business, and others).more » « less
-
Although on average women are underrepresented in academic science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) departments at universities, an under appreciated fact is that women’s representation varies widely across STEM disciplines. Past research is fairly silent on how local variations in gender composition impact faculty experiences. This study fills that gap. A survey of STEM departments at a large research university finds that women faculty in STEM are less professionally satisfied than male colleagues only if they are housed in departments where women are a small numeric minority. Gender differences in satisfaction are largest in departments with less than 25% women, smaller in departments with 25–35% women, and nonexistent in departments approaching 50% women. Gender differences in professional satisfaction in gender-unbalanced departments are mediated by women’s perception that their department’s climate is uncollegial, faculty governance is non-transparent, and gender relations are inequitable. Unfavorable department climates also predict retention risk for women in departments with few women, but not in departments closer to gender parity. Finally, faculty who find within-department mentors to be useful are more likely to have a favorable view of their department’s climate, which consequently predicts more professional satisfaction. Faculty gender and gender composition does not moderate these findings, suggesting that mentoring is equally effective for all faculty. Keywords: gender; STEM; climate; retention; facultymore » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04966-w
