Are Female Early-Career Scientists Less Likely to Conduct Interdisciplinary Research?
Are Female Early-Career Scientists Less Likely to Conduct Interdisciplinary Research?
Meijun Liu, Sijie Yang, Yi Bu, Ning Zhang
“Publish or perish” is an iron rule in academia. To gain a place in the highly competitive academic community, early-career scientists (hereafter ECSs) must be able to publish a sufficient number of papers and make their papers influential enough to achieve both quantity and quality.
In recent decades, numerous countries have actively promoted and encouraged interdisciplinary research (hereafter IDR), as it is believed to promote scientific development and innovation. Recent studies have shown that interdisciplinary publications tend to attract more citations and gain higher societal visibility, thus potentially contributing to long-term career development. However, pursuing IDR requires significant time and effort to integrate knowledge from diverse disciplines, and such research may face difficulties in terms of publication and recognition compared to more traditional research. The high risk and uncertainty associated with IDR discouraged many ECSs that are facing “up or out” pressure.
The literature on gender-related biological and psychological origins suggests that female scientists may be more inclined to engage in IDR. Research findings indicate that females are better at assimilating diverse forms of information and making connections between ideas, and are more oriented toward advancing knowledge that meets human needs rather than conventional scientific motivations. However, cultural factors, such as gender stereotypes, the prevailing “masculine” culture in STEM disciplines, and a lack of role models, can make females more cautious and conservative in their research strategies, thus preventing them from engaging in IDR.
—extensive literature highlights the significance of advisors’ gender in shaping mentoring experiences and outcomes, but little attention is paid to the role of advisors’ gender in influencing students’ involvement in IDR—
The doctoral thesis is a crucial research output of junior scientists, reflecting part of their academic culture, thinking, learning, and writing skills, which can help us understand the interdisciplinary research capacity of ECSs. Advisors’ role is pivotal in molding students’ selection of research topics and their thesis writing, including providing crucial guidance in defining the theoretical framework, research questions, research design, and addressing any challenges encountered during the thesis writing process. However, extensive literature highlights the significance of advisors’ gender in shaping mentoring experiences and outcomes, but little attention is paid to the role of advisors’ gender in influencing students’ involvement in IDR. Given the varying outcomes of different types of student-advisor gender pairings on students’ productivity and success, the impact of gender pairings on students’ engagement in IDR may also be different.
So how do young researchers navigate this increasingly interdisciplinary trend? What role does gender play in this process? We reveal this by examining the prevalence of interdisciplinary research among ECSs, the gender differences in ECSs’ engagement in IDR, and the influence of advisor gender on the interdisciplinary level of doctoral dissertations.
This study used data from doctoral theses in five representative scientific domains of the PQDT’s Sciences and Engineering Collection: behavioral sciences, biological sciences, engineering, health and medical sciences, and mathematical and physical sciences. The gender of authors and advisors is predicted using the open-source module gender-guesser in Python, which is viewed as one of the most advanced tools for predicting gender from first names and has been widely used in relevant literature. To ensure high accuracy in gender prediction, we only retain observations with a definite predicted gender attribute (“male” or “female”) for students. The final dataset included 675,135 doctoral theses completed by students from 747 U.S. universities.
For doctoral theses within PQDT, citation data is not available, which means it is impossible to calculate the interdisciplinarity level based on citations. In this study, we measure the interdisciplinarity by employing co-occurrence matrices of subjects assigned to doctoral theses in PQDT. Specifically, we constructed a co-occurrence matrix of subjects using 552 secondary subjects assigned to all papers in PQDT and calculated the cosine similarity between any two subjects. For any thesis that is classified into more than one subject, the interdisciplinarity level is expressed as the average distance(1-cosine similarity) between subjects assigned to the thesis. The larger the average distance, the more interdisciplinary it is. If a thesis is classified to only one subject, we define the average distance value as zero, indicating that this thesis is not interdisciplinary at all.
Evolution of interdisciplinary doctoral theses
Doctoral theses by U.S. Ph.D. students have demonstrated a growing trend toward IDR across different scientific domains and universities of varying research quality. Before 2000, interdisciplinary doctoral theses only accounted for 32.1% of the total doctoral theses. From 2000 to 2016, this proportion increased to 59.5%, suggesting that IDR has become dominant in doctoral theses. Meanwhile, the average distance between subjects in doctoral theses is growing, suggesting that Ph.D. students are inclined to combine different types of disciplinary knowledge that are increasingly cognitively distant. Ph.D. students are becoming more and more adaptive to the growing complex social and economic problems and are getting more engaged in IDR.
Gender disparities in interdisciplinary doctoral theses
The results of the multivariate linear regression models indicate that the average distance between subjects in male-authored doctoral theses is significantly greater than that in female-authored theses, and this gender disparity displays a growing trend over time and is more prominent in top-tier universities and some scientific domains including biological sciences and health and medical sciences.
However, the gender combination of students and advisors influences the average distance between subjects covered in their doctoral theses. Specifically, the gender difference in the average distance between subjects is more pronounced when students are mentored by female advisors compared to male advisors. The possible reason for this is that when female students are mentored by female advisors, they tend to exhibit a heightened awareness of cultural factors and systemic barriers that present challenges for female scientists. As a result, these students may adopt more cautious and conservative research strategies to mitigate potential negative impacts on their career advancement that could arise from engaging in IDR. In contrast, no similar considerations appear to influence male students under the guidance of female advisors or students of any gender supervised by male advisors.
In order to mitigate gender gaps in IDR for ECSs, it is critical to address the systematic gender biases within current scientific practices and rewards. Female scientists, particularly those in the early-career stages, should be supported and funded to engage better in IDR. In addition, the findings that female advisors exacerbate the gender disparity in ECSs’ engagement in IDR suggest that providing additional support to female faculty members may not only directly benefit their career development but also hold significant importance in fostering the growth and success of future generations of female scientists.
We apply four methods to investigate the robustness of the major finding in this study, including using another commonly used gender inference tool (Genderize.io) to predict the gender of students and advisors, expanding the sample size, calculating the interdisciplinarity of each doctoral thesis based on their titles, and considering the influence of advisors’ characteristics on the student’s engagement in IDR. Generally, we observe a persistent pattern of lower participation in IDR among female students.
The original article on which this essay is based is Liu, M., Yang, S., Bu, Y. et al. Female early-career scientists have conducted less interdisciplinary research in the past six decades: evidence from doctoral theses. Humanities Social Science Communication 10, 918 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-02392-5
Meijun Liu is an Assistant Professor at Institute for Global Public Policy, Fudan University, China. Her research areas include science of science, informetrics and S&T policy. Based on big data analytics, advanced econometrics and data mining techniques, her research aims to reveal whether and how scientific collaboration and mobility influence research output, team performance and regional innovation.
Sijie Yang is a research assistant at the Center for Informationalization and Information Management Research, Peking University, China. His research areas include science of science, informetrics and scientometrics. He is skilled at data mining, natural language processing and data visualization. He has an undergraduate degree in Information Resources Management from Zhejiang University.
Yi Bu is an Assistant Professor in Data Science at the Department of Information Management, Peking University, China. Yi aims to understand the social dimensions of the global scientific ecosystem by leveraging massive datasets, computational techniques, and social theories. Yi is particularly focusing on scholarly data mining—specially, his research endeavors to elucidate the process of knowledge diffusion (e.g., differences between knowledge diffusion of interdisciplinary and unidisciplinary publications), the analysis of scholarly networks and their variants (e.g., co-citation, bibliographic coupling, and some hybrid networks), and bibliometric indicators for research assessment (e.g., citation-based impact indicators).
Ning Zhang is a doctoral student at the School of Information Management, Nanjing University, China. Her research interests include scientometrics and science and science, focusing on gender differences in the scientific community, including manifestations and influences in different aspects, such as research output, scientific impact, and scientist mobility.
Cite this article in APA as: Liu, M., Yang, S., Bu, Y., Zhang, N. Are female early-career scientists less likely to conduct interdisciplinary research? (2023, December 12). Information Matters, Vol. 3, Issue 12. https://informationmatters.org/2023/12/are-female-early-career-scientists-less-likely-to-conduct-interdisciplinary-research/
