are all researchers male?

Are all researchers male? Gender misattributions in citations


Michaª Krawczyk

GendEQU project

Faculty of Economic Sciences

University of Warsaw

June, 2016

Lies! Copernicus was a woman!What? And Einstein?Einstein was also a woman!And maybe Curie-Skªodowska also?! Well, that wasn't the bestexample . . .

Seksmisja (1983)


Introduction

The case of IFLS

One of the most popular science pages on Facebook: Ì F*****g LoveScience':

19 904 998 likes (28/02/2015)publishes daily several posts on scienti�c achievements - mainly from the�eld of physics and natural sciences (but sometimes also social sciences andhumanities)

...and is run by a woman

Elise Andrew - the founder of IFLS blog - revealed her identity (and hergender) two years ago. Thousands of comments from shocked IFLS fansfollowed

Tyler Linson: Ì had no idea you were a female.... damn thats hot hahaha'Pierre Rodriguez: Ì had an intuition not to take the posts [on IFLS]seriously...'


Introduction

The case of IFLS

One of the most popular science pages on Facebook: Ì F*****g LoveScience':

19 904 998 likes (28/02/2015)publishes daily several posts on scienti�c achievements - mainly from the�eld of physics and natural sciences (but sometimes also social sciences andhumanities)...and is run by a woman

Elise Andrew - the founder of IFLS blog - revealed her identity (and hergender) two years ago. Thousands of comments from shocked IFLS fansfollowed

Tyler Linson: Ì had no idea you were a female.... damn thats hot hahaha'Pierre Rodriguez: Ì had an intuition not to take the posts [on IFLS]seriously...'


Introduction

Gender-science stereotype: the case of IFLS

Elise Andrew's reaction:

Do people still identify science with men only?


Introduction

Draw a scientist test


Introduction

Some literature on gender-science stereotype

Mead, Metraux [1957]:subjects: high-school studentstask: write an essay "what do you think about science and scientists?"result: over 90% described being scientist as a carrier for man

Chambers [1983]:subjects: preschool childrentask: Draw-A-Scientist Testresult: only 28 on 4000 kids drew a woman

Liu et al. [2010]:subjects: high-school students (China)result: gender-science stereotype was stronger in science classes (withadvanced physics or mathematics program)

Losh [2010]:subjects: adults (American)task: a surveyresult: `scientist is a workaholic male'

Nosek et al. [2009]: Implicit Association Test (psychological test designedto reveal unconscious preferences)


Introduction

Possible e�ects of the stereotype

Female achievements and ideas ascribed to male scientists (Mathildae�ect)

Female scientists considered less quali�ed than their male colleagues

Female scientists considered less attractive as women

Women less often start scienti�c carrier and more often give up


Introduction

Unreliable citations

Draw-A-Scientist and IAT studies con�rm gender-science stereotype � dowe �nd the same result in observational data?

Important role of citations in the academic carrier

Frequent errors in citations (Eichorn and Yankauer, 1987)

Citations are connected not only with the quality of the paper (Bornmannand Daniel, 2008)

Some studies show that female-authored papers are less often cited(Davenport and Snyder, 1995), some do not support this view (Budden etal., 2009; Powell et al., 2009)

If we cite an article, do we assume that the author is male?


Present study

What comes more frequently: female authors being cited as if they weremales or vice versa?

1. Articles

2. Master theses and doctoral dissertations


Present study

Articles

Study 1 - design

Selection of the articles

we are looking for one-author papers only

we want ca. half of them to be written by women (so we are collectingonly one in �ve male-authored papers)

we use �rst names of the authors: the most popular male and female �rstnames from 1990 US census

only articles with the phrase `the author' (multi-authored papers areexcluded thanks to that)

only papers with at least 100 citations

without authors with double surnames, typical female surnames(Kowalska) or male su�xes (Jr)

seven �elds of study


Present study

Articles

Study 1 - citing articles

Articles

The cases of misattribution:

for each paper we search for citing papers

in the text: surname of a female author + he/his orsurname of a male author + she/her at most 10 words apart

veri�cation if the pronoun is in fact referring to `our' author

we also search for the cases of correct gender attribution for the authorswith at least one mistake � by gender of the citing authors(female/male/mixed)

and correct attribution of randomly drawn papers for papers without anymisattributions.


Present study

Articles

Study 1 - results

Articles

only 66 misattribution cases in 2893 cited articles

female authors treated as male authors much more often than the otherway around: 1.16% vs. 0.04%

authorbroad �eld male femalebiology/medicine 0 1

(283) (133)economics/business 1 15

(340) (197)physics/chemistry/engineering 0 7

(652) (102)social science/humanities and arts 2 30

(478) (708)the total number of citable papers checked in the parentheses


Present study

Articles

Study 1 - results

Impact of �eld of study, publication year and number of citations on probabilityof misattribution - probit analysis

mistake β ε z P > |z |broad �eld:econ/bus .905 .387 2.34 0.019phys./chem./engi. .867 .410 2.11 0.035social sc., arts, hum. .636 .372 1.71 0.087

citations .0011 .0003 3.57 0.000citations2 -1.99e-07 9.43e-08 -2.10 0.035year .004 .005 0.69 0.489cons -10.427 11.167 -0.93 0.350

N 1139LR χ2(6) 35.21Prob > χ2 0.0000Log likelihood -196.723Pseudo R2 0.082


Present study

Articles

Study 1 - results

Gender of the citing author does not a�ect the probability of misattribution

�eld F M F&Mmist. freq (attr.) mist. freq (attr.) mist. freq (attr.)

bio/ med 0.25 (4) 0 (7) 0 (3)econ/ bus 0.11 (37) 0.08 (102) 0.13 (32)phys./chem./engi. 0.05 (22) 0.07 (70) 0.24 (21)social sc./ arts/ hum. 0.07 (168) 0.11 (133) 0.08 (83)total 0.08 (231) 0.09 (312) 0.12 (139)


Present study

Articles

Study 1

Articles - conclusion

very low number of gender misattributions in comparison to the number ofarticles analyzed

...and in comparison to the total number of attributions (correct andincorrect)

(partially, because it is very easy to avoid gender attribution in English)

mistakes appear more often in articles from the �elds of humanities andsocial sciences than in natural science or engineering papers

almost all mistakes involve ascribing male gender to female authors


Present study

Master theses and dissertations

Study 2 - procedure


in Polish grammar forms depend strongly on gender of the noun

we focus on the �eld of psychology (mostly written in Polish, withrelatively long list of references, many of which correspond to femaleauthors, suitable citation manner - surnames of cited authors provided inthe text (rather than numbers in brackets)

120 master theses and 38 dissertations defended recently at social sciencesdepartments in Warsaw

we analyzed manually every citation to identify mistakes


Present study


Study 2 - procedure

Four types of possible misattribution

incorrect surname form (np. �Badania Holland, Hendriksa i Aarts z 2005�)

incorrect verb form

pronouns - she/he, his/her

female or male noun form


Present study


Study 2a: prevalence of misattributions in dissertations, in percent, n=995


Present study


Study 2b: prevalence of misattributions in master theses, in percent, n=1553


Conclusions

To wrap up...

Study 1: scienti�c papersgender misattributions are very rareweak impact of the �eld of study. slightly more often in the �elds withrelatively stronger position (larger number) of female researchers(humanities and social sciences)female-turned-male errors dramatically more common than the reverse; butthen the sample is really smallgender of the citing author is irrelevant

Study 2a: dissertationsgender misattributions are quite commonfemale-turned-male type prevailsno impact of the citing author's gender

Study 2b: master thesesgender misattributions are very commonfemale-turned-male type prevailsespecially prevalent in male authors

To summarize, a new method provided new evidence in the discussion ongender-science stereotype


Conclusions

Thank you for your attention!

are all researchers male?

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