Gender differences in scientific collaborations: Women are more egalitarian than men

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.

Fig 1

a) Distribution of the number of collaborators for men (blue squares) and women (red asterisks). The distributions are fitted with a truncated power law, P(k) = Ak^−αe^−k/β, plotted as dashed lines with colors corresponding to data points. The best fit is obtained for α = 1.53, and β = 85.4 and β = 49.5, for men and women, respectively, with r-squared 0.996 for men and 0.999 for women. b) Distribution of the number of recurrent collaborations between scientists (weights) for men (blue squares) and women (red asterisks). Solid lines are power-law fits, P(w) = Bw^−λ, with colors corresponding to data points. For men, λ = 2.86 ± 0.04, while for women λ = 3.17 ± 0.06. With r-squared 0.997 for men and 0.996 for women.

Fig 2. Mean values of the g-ratio across fields.

Same abreviations for the fields as in Table 2. Blue (left) and red (right) bars represent values for men and women, respectively. Yellow triangles show the fraction of women working in the respective field. The error bars are smaller than 0.1% (see Table 3).

Fig 3. Relation between the g-ratio and the number of collaborators for Biological Sciences (BIO, main plot) and Engineering (ENG, inset) for women (red stars) and men (blue circles).

Lines represent the fraction of women in the respective field. Men are more likely to collaborate with other men than with their female peers. For Engineering, the g-ratio is even above the fraction of women in the field. Error bars indicate the standard error for each bin.

Fig 4. Dependence of the m-ratio on the number of collaborators in Biological Sciences (BIO, main plot) and Exact and Earth Sciences (EXA, inset) for women (red starts) and men (blue circles).

Except for Exact and Earth Sciences (see inset), there is only a slight difference regarding multidisciplinary collaborations. Error bars indicate the standard error for each bin.