TY - JOUR
T1 - Gender inequities in the online dissemination of scholars' work
AU - Vásárhelyi, Orsolya
AU - Zakhlebin, Igor
AU - Milojević, Staša
AU - Horvát, Emoke Ágnes
N1 - Funding Information:
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. We thank Altmetric for generously providing data from their platform. This project also uses Web of Science data by Clarivate Analytics provided by the Indiana University Network Science Institute and the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center at Indiana University. This work was also enabled by a doctoral research support grant from Cen-
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
PY - 2021/9/28
Y1 - 2021/9/28
N2 - Unbiased science dissemination has the potential to alleviate some of the known gender disparities in academia by exposing female scholars' work to other scientists and the public. And yet, we lack comprehensive understanding of the relationship between gender and science dissemination online. Our largescale analyses, encompassing half a million scholars, revealed that female scholars' work is mentioned less frequently than male scholars' work in all research areas. When exploring the characteristics associated with online success, we found that the impact of prior work, social capital, and gendered tie formation in coauthorship networks are linked with online success for men, but not for women-even in the areas with the highest female representation. These results suggest that while men's scientific impact and collaboration networks are associated with higher visibility online, there are no universally identifiable facets associated with success for women. Our comprehensive empirical evidence indicates that the gender gap in online science dissemination is coupled with a lack of understanding the characteristics that are linked with female scholars' success, which might hinder efforts to close the gender gap in visibility.
AB - Unbiased science dissemination has the potential to alleviate some of the known gender disparities in academia by exposing female scholars' work to other scientists and the public. And yet, we lack comprehensive understanding of the relationship between gender and science dissemination online. Our largescale analyses, encompassing half a million scholars, revealed that female scholars' work is mentioned less frequently than male scholars' work in all research areas. When exploring the characteristics associated with online success, we found that the impact of prior work, social capital, and gendered tie formation in coauthorship networks are linked with online success for men, but not for women-even in the areas with the highest female representation. These results suggest that while men's scientific impact and collaboration networks are associated with higher visibility online, there are no universally identifiable facets associated with success for women. Our comprehensive empirical evidence indicates that the gender gap in online science dissemination is coupled with a lack of understanding the characteristics that are linked with female scholars' success, which might hinder efforts to close the gender gap in visibility.
KW - Computational social science
KW - Gender inequality
KW - STEM
KW - Scholarly communication
KW - Social networks
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U2 - 10.1073/pnas.2102945118
DO - 10.1073/pnas.2102945118
M3 - Article
C2 - 34544861
AN - SCOPUS:85115309967
SN - 0027-8424
VL - 118
JO - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
JF - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
IS - 39
M1 - e2102945118
ER -
