Understanding Gender Gaps in Academic Science through the Lens of Topic Fit: An Interdisciplinary Investigation Using a Big Data Approach

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The participation of women in science has steadily increased since the 1960s. However, gender disparities continue to exist in academic science around the world, both in the quantity and in the impact of research output. In the decade after 2000, male researchers, on average, published 35% more papers and received 34% more citations than female researchers. These gender gaps are even wider in the United States than the global average. Understanding causes of persistent gender gaps in research is of grave significance for improving gender equality in academic institutions. The current project is an interdisciplinary effort to address this question and advance knowledge across multiple fields, including psychology, sociology, organizational behavior, human resource management, and scientometrics. It will propose a novel theory that integrates existing perspectives and test it using a big data approach.Specifically, the project investigates topic fit (i.e., the degree of subject topic similarity or congruence between any new collaboration and a researcher’s existing work) as a key mechanism for understanding gender gaps in research productivity and impact. Drawing upon Social Role Theory, it is theorized that gender role norms and expectations may lead female and male scholars to have different collaboration patterns with junior researchers and lower levels of topic fit for women, which, in turn, would explain a productivity penalty for women. The investigators are analyzing publication records of over 90 million researchers around the world, computing topic fit indices using novel methods, and testing these indices as a critical mechanism for explaining gender gaps using both path analysis at the individual researcher level and multilevel modeling to account for the nested structure of the data. Importantly, the project also examines differences across academic disciplines and analyzes trends over time. Findings can inform institutional policies and practices for advancing gender equality in academic science.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.