Women are underrepresented in computational biology: An analysis of the scholarly literature in biology, computer science and computational biology.
Women are underrepresented in computational biology: An analysis of the scholarly literature in biology, computer science and computational biology.
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DOI：
10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005134
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发表时间：
2017-10
影响因子：
4.3
通讯作者：
Stefan MI
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Bonham KS;Stefan MI
虽然妇女在STEM领域的代表性普遍不足，但各领域之间存在明显差异。例如，生物学领域的性别比例比计算机科学领域更加平衡。我们感兴趣的是这种差异是如何反映在计算/定量生物学的跨学科领域。为此，我们检查了PubMed和arXiv数据库中发表文章中女性作者的比例。与一般生物学相比，计算生物学研究论文的女性作者较少。这在作者位置、年份和期刊影响因子方面都是如此。与arXiv的比较表明，定量生物学论文的女性作者比例高于计算机科学论文，在性别代表性方面，计算生物学介于其两个父领域之间。在生物学和计算生物学中，女性最后作者增加了论文中其他作者为女性的可能性，指出女性PI在影响性别平衡方面的潜在作用。在科学、技术、工程和数学领域工作的妇女少于男子。然而，STEM中的一些领域比其他领域更性别平衡。例如，生物学专业的妇女比例相对较高，而计算机科学专业的妇女人数很少。那么计算生物学呢？作为一个跨学科的STEM领域，它的性别平衡是接近它的“母”领域之一，还是介于两者之间？为了研究这个问题，我们检查了生物学，计算生物学和计算机科学的学术出版物数据库中的作者数据。我们发现，计算生物学介于计算机科学和生物学之间，就女性代表性而言。这与其他因素无关，例如出版年份。这表明，计算生物学可能提供一个比计算机科学其他领域更有利于女性参与的环境。在这三个领域中，我们还发现，如果出版物的最后一位作者通常是研究的负责人是女性，那么在其他作者职位上也会有更多的女性。这表明，让女性担任领导职务可能有利于整体性别平衡，尽管我们的数据无法揭示潜在的机制。
While women are generally underrepresented in STEM fields, there are noticeable differences between fields. For instance, the gender ratio in biology is more balanced than in computer science. We were interested in how this difference is reflected in the interdisciplinary field of computational/quantitative biology. To this end, we examined the proportion of female authors in publications from the PubMed and arXiv databases. There are fewer female authors on research papers in computational biology, as compared to biology in general. This is true across authorship position, year, and journal impact factor. A comparison with arXiv shows that quantitative biology papers have a higher ratio of female authors than computer science papers, placing computational biology in between its two parent fields in terms of gender representation. Both in biology and in computational biology, a female last author increases the probability of other authors on the paper being female, pointing to a potential role of female PIs in influencing the gender balance. There are fewer women than men working in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). However, some fields within STEM are more gender-balanced than others. For instance, biology has a relatively high proportion of women, whereas there are few women in computer science. But what about computational biology? As an interdisciplinary STEM field, would its gender balance be close to one of its “parent” fields, or in between the two? To investigate this question, we examined authorship data from databases of scholarly publications in biology, computational biology, and computer science. We found that computational biology lies in between computer science and biology, as far as female representation goes. This is independent of other factors, e.g. year of publication. This suggests that computational biology might provide an environment that is more conducive to female participation that other areas of computer science. Across all three fields, we also found that if the last author on a publication—usually the person leading the study—is a women, then there will also be more women in other authorship positions. This suggests that having women in leadership positions might be beneficial for overall gender balance, though our data do not allow us to uncover the underlying mechanism.
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影响因子：
3.7
作者：
West JD;Jacquet J;King MM;Correll SJ;Bergstrom CT
通讯作者：
Bergstrom CT
DOI：
10.1073/pnas.1510649112
发表时间：
2015-10-27
影响因子：
11.1
作者：
Handley, Ian M.;Brown, Elizabeth R.;Smith, Jessi L.
通讯作者：
Smith, Jessi L.
DOI：
10.1073/pnas.1211286109
发表时间：
2012-10-09
影响因子：
11.1
作者：
Moss-Racusin, Corinne A.;Dovidio, John F.;Handelsman, Jo
通讯作者：
Handelsman, Jo
影响因子：
3.7
作者：
Mihaljević-Brandt H;Santamaría L;Tullney M
通讯作者：
Tullney M
影响因子：
9.9
作者：
Milkman, Katherine L.;Akinola, Modupe;Chugh, Dolly
通讯作者：
Chugh, Dolly