Women belong in the home (country): examining gender differences in the scientific mobility

• In Event: How Does Mobility Change Researchers, Research Groups And Scientific Communities? (II)

Abstract

The last several decades have brought significant reforms aimed at improving gender parity in the sciences. These have been largely effective at increasing matriculation rates at all levels of education; however, women remain severely underrepresented in the scientific workforce. Women constitute a smaller proportion of papers and produce less individually. They are also cited significantly less than their male counterparts, even when publishing in journals of equal prestige. Several factors have been investigated to understand these disparities. The effect of mobility, however, has been largely neglected in these analyses. A global study of gender disparities found that women tend to collaborate more domestically than internationally when compared to men from the same country. One explanation could be patterns of inhibited mobility, which could also contribute to lower citation rates given that mobile scholars are more highly cited than non-mobile. In this study, we use Web of Science publication and citation data on all scholars (n=1,655,483) who published their first paper in 2008. We examine different rates of mobility between men and women, controlling for country and discipline. Production and citation rates are used as metrics of academic success to determine whether there are differential benefits of mobility for men and women. This study provides novel insight into the ways in which the scientific workforce is mobilized and the effects of this mobility, by gender.

Author

• Cassidy Sugimoto, Indiana University Bloomington