Post on 22-Jan-2018
Stefanie Haustein, Adèle Paul-Hus, Cassidy R. Sugimoto & Vincent Larivière@stefhaustein
Is the gender gap in science mirrored in altmetrics?
image from: http://her.yourstory.com/india-global-gender-gap-index-1119
Gender Gap in Science
Larivière, V., Ni, C.C., Gingras, Y., Cronin, B., & Sugimoto, C.R. (2013). Global gender disparities in science. Nature, 504(7479), 211–213.
Shen, H. (2013). Inequality quantified: Mind the gender gap. Nature, 495(7439), 22-24.
General online population• Early Internet use heavily male-dominated (Weiser, 2000)
• Increased female participation on social networking sites (Kimbrough et al., 2013)
• 77% of women, 66% of men in the US use Facebook
2015 (Duggan, 2015)
• 21% of women, 25% of men in the US use Twitter 2015 (Duggan, 2015)
Academics online• Greater web presence of male academics (van der Weijden &
Calero Medina, 2014)
• Men blog at a greater rate (Shema, Bar-Ilan & Thelwall, 2012)
• More scientific papers are tweeted by men (Tsou, Bowman,
Ghazinejad, & Sugimoto, 2015)
• Social media can flatten academics hierarchies (Veletsianos,
2016)
Gender Gap Online
• Does the gender disparity observed for publications
and citations extend to social media?
• Does the visibility of male and female led papers differ
among the following social media platforms:
Research Questions
• Blogs
• Wikipedia
• Mendeley
• Arts
• Biology
• Biomedical Research
• Chemistry
• Clinical Medicine
• Earth & Space
• Engineering & Technology
• Health
• Humanities
• Mathematics
• Physics
• Professional Fields
• Psychology
• Social Sciences
• Does the gender gap in social media visibility of
scholarly journal articles differ by scientific discipline?
Dataset and Methods
* based on country-specific first name gender assignment; see Larivière, Ni, Gingras, Cronin, & Sugimoto (2013)
769,695journal articles
published 2013 blogs
Mendeley
Wikipedia
Facebookgender of
first authors*
• Comparison of female and male first-authored papers by
• social media platform
• discipline
Comparing distinct gender distributions
• Coverage
• Mean
• 99th percentile
Confidence intervals based on
bootstrap with replacement
Comparing gender within unified distribution
• Percentile ranks
𝑃𝑖 =(𝑖 − 0.44)
(𝑛 + 0.12)
Dataset and Methods
n : number of total articles
i : rank if ordered according to social media counts
Gringorten, I.I. (1963). A plotting rule for extreme probability paper. Journal of Geophysical Research, 68, 813–814.
Results
• Gender disparities are less pronounced on social media
than for citations
• Results vary by platforms, discipline and indicator
• Coverage
• No difference: 37 / 53%
• Female dominance: 20 / 29%
• Male dominance: 13 / 19%
• Mean
• No difference: 44 / 63%
• Female dominance: 19 / 27%
• Male dominance: 15 / 21%
• 99th percentile
• No difference: 58 / 83%
• Female dominance: 0 / 0%
• Male dominance: 12 / 17%
Percentage of papers
with at least one event
Average number
of events per paper
99th percentile
Results
Coverage – differences between social media platforms
• Facebook• No difference: 9 / 64%
• Female dominance: 2 / 14%
• Male dominance: 3 / 21%
• Mendeley• No difference: 7 / 50%
• Female dominance: 6 / 43%
• Male dominance: 1 / 7%
• Blogs• No difference: 8 / 57%
• Female dominance: 1 / 7%
• Male dominance: 5 / 36%
• Twitter• No difference: 6 / 43%
• Female dominance: 4 / 29%
• Male dominance: 4 / 29%
• Wikipedia• No difference: 7 / 50%
• Female dominance: 0 / 0%
• Male dominance: 7 / 50%
Conclusions
• Gender disparities are less pronounced on social
media than for citations
• Platform and discipline specific differences
Potential of some social media platforms to overcome
traditional hierarchies?
Largely unknown what kind of “impact” is being
measured through mentions of academic papers