Gender differences in scientific collaborations: Women are more egalitarian than men

TL;DR

This study analyzes gender differences in scientific collaboration patterns, revealing women tend to be more egalitarian than men across most fields, with notable exceptions in engineering and natural sciences.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of gender-based collaboration behaviors across multiple scientific fields using a large dataset, highlighting consistent patterns and exceptions.

Findings

Women are more egalitarian in collaborations than men.

Gender differences in collaboration patterns are consistent across fields.

In engineering, gender bias in collaboration disappears with more collaborators.

Abstract

By analyzing a unique dataset of more than 270,000 scientists, we discovered substantial gender differences in scientific collaborations. While men are more likely to collaborate with other men, women are more egalitarian. This is consistently observed over all fields and regardless of the number of collaborators a scientist has. The only exception is observed in the field of engineering, where this gender bias disappears with increasing number of collaborators. We also found that the distribution of the number of collaborators follows a truncated power law with a cut-off that is gender dependent and related to the gender differences in the number of published papers. Considering interdisciplinary research, our analysis shows that men and women behave similarly across fields, except in the case of natural sciences, where women with many collaborators are more likely to have collaborators from other fields.