# Gender Disparities in Science? Dropout, Productivity, Collaborations and Success of Male and Female Computer Scientists

## TL;DR

This study analyzes over a million computer scientists over 47 years, revealing gender disparities in collaboration patterns, dropout rates, and success, with women less likely to adopt successful collaboration behaviors.

## Contribution

It provides a comprehensive longitudinal analysis of gender-specific collaboration behaviors and their impact on scientific success in computer science.

## Key findings

- Successful male and female scientists share similar collaboration patterns.
- Women exhibit higher dropout rates and less adaptive collaboration behaviors.
- Gender homophily and embedding in less connected networks are more common among women.

## Abstract

Scientific collaborations shape ideas as well as innovations and are both the substrate for, and the outcome of, academic careers. Recent studies show that gender inequality is still present in many scientific practices ranging from hiring to peer-review processes and grant applications. In this work, we investigate gender-specific differences in collaboration patterns of more than one million computer scientists over the course of 47 years. We explore how these patterns change over years and career ages and how they impact scientific success. Our results highlight that successful male and female scientists reveal the same collaboration patterns: compared to scientists in the same career age, they tend to collaborate with more colleagues than other scientists, seek innovations as brokers and establish longer-lasting and more repetitive collaborations. However, women are on average less likely to adapt the collaboration patterns that are related with success, more likely to embed into ego networks devoid of structural holes, and they exhibit stronger gender homophily as well as a consistently higher dropout rate than men in all career ages.