Women scientists author fewer invited commentaries in medical journals than men

October 23, 2019

Science Daily/Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Women scientists were 21% less likely to author invited commentaries in medical journals during a five-year period than men with similar scientific expertise, seniority, and publication metrics, according to a new study led by researchers from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and in collaboration with Elsevier. They found that the disparity was larger for women who were further progressed in their careers, reaching as high as 40% for the most senior authors.

In medical journals, publication of an invited commentary is a recognition of expertise and can raise an author's profile.

"I was genuinely surprised by the size of the gender gap we found," said first author Emma Thomas, a doctoral student in the Department of Biostatistics. "As a young female scientist, I hoped that we might achieve gender parity in authorship of invited articles naturally as more women progressed to the top of the scientific pipeline. Our results suggest that may not be the case."

The study will be published online in JAMA Network Open on October 23, 2019.

The researchers analyzed data on all invited commentaries published in English-language medical journals from 2013 through 2017, made available by Elsevier from its Scopus database. The researchers compared the gender of each "case" -- authors of invited commentaries -- to the gender of a group of "controls" -- other researchers who had similar scientific expertise to the case author, identified through text mining of their published abstracts. The final dataset included 43,235 cases across 2,459 journals.

The researchers found that female researchers were approximately 21% less likely than their male peers to publish an invited commentary. The gender disparity was larger for researchers who had been actively publishing for longer. Overall, just 23% of invited commentaries in the dataset had female corresponding authors.

"These findings challenge the common assumption that gender disparities in authorship of prestigious scientific articles exist because there are fewer women with sufficient experience and expertise to write these articles," said senior author Francesca Dominici, Clarence James Gamble Professor of Biostatistics, Population, and Data Science and co-director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative. "Our results also show that women's voices are not heard as often as men's. This lack of diversity in perspectives can hamper the progress of health research, since diversity of thought is a key driver of innovation."

The authors suggest that journals could expand and diversify their pool of commentary writers by using text mining software to identify researchers with relevant expertise who might not otherwise have been considered.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191023172110.htm

Strong friendships among women in the workplace reduce conflict

July 14, 2017

Science Daily/Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences

When employers foster an office environment that supports positive, social relationships between women coworkers, especially in primarily male dominated organizations, they are less likely to experience conflict among women employees, new research confirms.

According to a new study in the INFORMS journal Organization Science, when employers foster an office environment that supports positive, social relationships between women coworkers, especially in primarily male dominated organizations, they are less likely to experience conflict among women employees.

The study, "Gender and Negative Work Ties: Exploring Difficult Work Relationships Within and Across Gender at Two Firms" was conducted by Jenifer Merluzzi of George Washington University.

Merluzzi surveyed 145 management-level employees regarding workplace dynamics at two large U.S. firms that were primarily male-dominated environments, with women representing less than one-third of the workforce and under 15 percent of the senior management.

The study author found that, while men and women are equally likely to cite having a difficult co-worker, compared to men, women are more likely to cite another woman as a difficult coworker than they are to cite a man, or not cite anyone. However, this tendency is reduced among women who cite having more women coworkers for social support and friendship at work. Knowing that unique gendered network characteristics such as the gender compositions of an employee's social support at work were associated with negative ties can help organizational leaders anticipate potential trouble spots within their firms where gendered conflict may erupt.

"While gender diversity and inequality are well document topics in management, sociology and labor economics, few have looked closely at the gendered negative relationships within the workplace from a social relationship perspective," said Merluzzi. "Understanding the relational side of conflict also bears practical importance as companies increasingly organize using diverse teams, heightening the reliance on informal ties between and within gender to get work accomplished."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170714140236.htm