New Research Article: “Gender Differences in Scientific Collaborations: Women are More Egalitarian than Men”

The following full text research article (preprint) was made available via the arXiv repository.
Title
Gender Differences in Scientific Collaborations: Women are More Egalitarian than Men
Authors
Eduardo B. Araujo
Universidade Federal do Ceara, Campus do Pici, Brazil
Ciencia e Tecnologia do Ceara, Campus Acara, Brazil
Nuno A. M. Araujo
Universidade de Lisboa, Campo Grande, Portugal
Andre A. Moreira
Universidade Federal do Ceara, Campus do Pici, Brazil
Hans J. Herrmann
Universidade Federal do Ceara, Campus do Pici, Brazil
ETH Zurich. Switzerland
J. S. Andrade Jr.
Universidade Federal do Ceara, Campus do Pici, Brazil
Source
via arXiv
Abstract

By analyzing a unique dataset of more than 270,000 scientists, we discovered substantial gender differences in scientific collaborations. While men are more likely to collaborate with other men, women are more egalitarian. This is consistently observed over all fields and regardless of the number of collaborators a scientist has. The only exception is observed in the field of engineering, where this gender bias disappears with increasing number of collaborators. We also found that the distribution of the number of collaborators follows a truncated power law with a cut-off that is gender dependent and related to the gender differences in the number of published papers. Considering interdisciplinary research, our analysis shows that men and women behave similarly across fields, except in the case of natural sciences, where women with many collaborators are more likely to have collaborators from other fields.

Direct to Full Text (5 pages; PDF)

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