Are all researchers male?

Are all researchers male? Gender misattributions in citations
Michaª Krawczyk
GendEQU project
Faculty of Economic Sciences
University of Warsaw
June, 2016
Lies! Copernicus was a woman!
What? And Einstein?
Einstein was also a woman!
And maybe Curie-Skªodowska also?! Well, that wasn't the best
example . . .
Seksmisja (1983)

Introduction
The case of IFLS
One of the most popular science pages on Facebook: `I F*****g Love
Science':
19 904 998 likes (28/02/2015)
publishes daily several posts on scientic achievements - mainly from the
eld of physics and natural sciences (but sometimes also social sciences and
humanities)

Introduction
The case of IFLS
Science':
19 904 998 likes (28/02/2015)
humanities)
...and is run by a woman

Introduction
The case of IFLS
Science':
19 904 998 likes (28/02/2015)
humanities)
...and is run by a woman
Elise Andrew - the founder of IFLS blog - revealed her identity (and her
gender) two years ago. Thousands of comments from shocked IFLS fans
followed
Tyler Linson: `I had no idea you were a female.... damn thats hot hahaha'
Pierre Rodriguez: `I had an intuition not to take the posts [on IFLS]
seriously...'

Introduction
Gender-science stereotype: the case of IFLS
Elise Andrew's reaction:
Do people still identify science with men only?

Introduction
Draw a scientist test

Introduction
Some literature on gender-science stereotype
Mead, Metraux [1957]:
subjects: high-school students
task: write an essay what do you think about science and scientists?
result: over 90% described being scientist as a carrier for man
Chambers [1983]:
subjects: preschool children
task: Draw-A-Scientist Test
result: only 28 on 4000 kids drew a woman
Liu et al. [2010]:
subjects: high-school students (China)
result: gender-science stereotype was stronger in science classes (with
advanced physics or mathematics program)
Losh [2010]:
subjects: adults (American)
task: a survey
result: `scientist is a workaholic male'
Nosek et al. [2009]: Implicit Association Test (psychological test designed
to reveal unconscious preferences)

Introduction
Possible eects of the stereotype
Female achievements and ideas ascribed to male scientists (Mathilda
eect)
Female scientists considered less qualied than their male colleagues
Female scientists considered less attractive as women
Women less often start scientic carrier and more often give up

Introduction
Unreliable citations
Draw-A-Scientist and IAT studies conrm gender-science stereotype do
we nd the same result in observational data?
Important role of citations in the academic carrier
Frequent errors in citations (Eichorn and Yankauer, 1987)
Citations are connected not only with the quality of the paper (Bornmann
and Daniel, 2008)
Some studies show that female-authored papers are less often cited
(Davenport and Snyder, 1995), some do not support this view (Budden et
al., 2009; Powell et al., 2009)
If we cite an article, do we assume that the author is male?

Present study
What comes more frequently: female authors being cited as if they were
males or vice versa?
1. Articles
2. Master theses and doctoral dissertations

Present study
Articles
Study 1 - design
Selection of the articles
we are looking for one-author papers only
we want ca. half of them to be written by women (so we are collecting
only one in ve male-authored papers)
we use rst names of the authors: the most popular male and female rst
names from 1990 US census
only articles with the phrase `the author' (multi-authored papers are
excluded thanks to that)
only papers with at least 100 citations
without authors with double surnames, typical female surnames
(Kowalska) or male suxes (Jr)
seven elds of study

Present study
Articles
Study 1 - citing articles
Articles
The cases of misattribution:
for each paper we search for citing papers
in the text: surname of a female author + he/his or
surname of a male author + she/her at most 10 words apart
verication if the pronoun is in fact referring to `our' author
we also search for the cases of correct gender attribution for the authors
with at least one mistake by gender of the citing authors
(female/male/mixed)
and correct attribution of randomly drawn papers for papers without any
misattributions.

Present study
Articles
Study 1 - results
Articles
only 66 misattribution cases in 2893 cited articles
female authors treated as male authors much more often than the other
way around: 1.16% vs. 0.04%
author
broad eld male female
biology/medicine 0 1
(283) (133)
economics/business 1 15
(340) (197)
physics/chemistry/engineering 0 7
(652) (102)
social science/humanities and arts 2 30
(478) (708)
the total number of citable papers checked in the parentheses

Present study
Articles
Study 1 - results
Impact of eld of study, publication year and number of citations on probability
of misattribution - probit analysis
mistake β z P |z|
broad eld:
econ/bus .905 .387 2.34 0.019
phys./chem./engi. .867 .410 2.11 0.035
social sc., arts, hum. .636 .372 1.71 0.087
citations .0011 .0003 3.57 0.000
citations
2
-1.99e-07 9.43e-08 -2.10 0.035
year .004 .005 0.69 0.489
cons -10.427 11.167 -0.93 0.350
N 1139
LR χ2
(6) 35.21
Prob χ2
0.0000
Log likelihood -196.723
Pseudo R2
0.082

Present study
Articles
Study 1 - results
Gender of the citing author does not aect the probability of misattribution
eld F M FM
mist. freq (attr.) mist. freq (attr.) mist. freq (attr.)
bio/ med 0.25 (4) 0 (7) 0 (3)
econ/ bus 0.11 (37) 0.08 (102) 0.13 (32)
phys./chem./engi. 0.05 (22) 0.07 (70) 0.24 (21)
social sc./ arts/ hum. 0.07 (168) 0.11 (133) 0.08 (83)
total 0.08 (231) 0.09 (312) 0.12 (139)

Present study
Articles
Study 1
Articles - conclusion
very low number of gender misattributions in comparison to the number of
articles analyzed
...and in comparison to the total number of attributions (correct and
incorrect)
(partially, because it is very easy to avoid gender attribution in English)
mistakes appear more often in articles from the elds of humanities and
social sciences than in natural science or engineering papers
almost all mistakes involve ascribing male gender to female authors

Present study
Master theses and dissertations
Study 2 - procedure
in Polish grammar forms depend strongly on gender of the noun
we focus on the eld of psychology (mostly written in Polish, with
relatively long list of references, many of which correspond to female
authors, suitable citation manner - surnames of cited authors provided in
the text (rather than numbers in brackets)
120 master theses and 38 dissertations defended recently at social sciences
departments in Warsaw
we analyzed manually every citation to identify mistakes

Present study
Study 2 - procedure
Four types of possible misattribution
incorrect surname form (np. Badania Holland, Hendriksa i Aarts z 2005)
incorrect verb form
pronouns - she/he, his/her
female or male noun form

Present study
Study 2a: prevalence of misattributions in dissertations, in percent, n=995

Present study
Study 2b: prevalence of misattributions in master theses, in percent, n=1553

Conclusions
To wrap up...
Study 1: scientic papers
gender misattributions are very rare
weak impact of the eld of study. slightly more often in the elds with
relatively stronger position (larger number) of female researchers
(humanities and social sciences)
female-turned-male errors dramatically more common than the reverse; but
then the sample is really small
gender of the citing author is irrelevant

Conclusions
To wrap up...
Study 2a: dissertations
gender misattributions are quite common
female-turned-male type prevails
no impact of the citing author's gender

Conclusions
To wrap up...
Study 2a: dissertations
gender misattributions are quite common
no impact of the citing author's gender
Study 2b: master theses
gender misattributions are very common
especially prevalent in male authors
To summarize, a new method provided new evidence in the discussion on
gender-science stereotype

Conclusions
Thank you for your attention!

Are all researchers male?

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