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

• Facebook

• Twitter

• 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

Twitter

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 – mostly gender balanced disciplines

Results

Coverage – disciplines with mixed results

Results

Coverage – female and male dominated disciplines

Results

Percentile rank distributions - Chemistry

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

image from: http://her.yourstory.com/india-global-gender-gap-index-1119

Stefanie Haustein

Thank you!

stefanie.haustein@umontreal.ca | @stefhaustein | crc.ebsi.umontreal.ca | slideshare.net/StefanieHaustein