Gender disparities in the dissemination and acquisition of scientific knowledge

TL;DR

This study investigates gender disparities in scientific knowledge dissemination within physics, revealing that women experience slower knowledge acquisition due to fewer collaborative ties, highlighting structural barriers in academic networks.

Contribution

The paper introduces a network-based contagion model to quantify gender disparities in knowledge diffusion, emphasizing the role of collaboration gaps over time.

Findings

Women acquire knowledge more slowly than men.

The collaboration gap significantly contributes to gender disparities.

Structural disadvantages accumulate over time, marginalizing women.

Abstract

Recent research has challenged the widespread belief that gender inequities in academia would disappear simply by increasing the number of women. More complex causes might be at play, embodied in the networked structure of scientific collaborations. Here, we aim to understand the structural inequality between male and female scholars in the dissemination of scientific knowledge. We use a large-scale dataset of academic publications from the American Physical Society (APS) to build a time-varying network of collaborations from 1970 to 2020. We model knowledge dissemination as a contagion process in which scientists become informed based on the propagation of knowledge through their collaborators. We quantify the fairness of the system in terms of how women acquire and diffuse knowledge compared to men. Our results indicate that knowledge acquisition and diffusion are slower for women than expected. We find that the main determinant of women's disadvantage is the gap in the cumulative number of collaborators, highlighting how time creates structural disadvantages that contribute to marginalize women in physics. Our work sheds light on how the dynamics of scientific collaborations shape gender disparities in knowledge dissemination and calls for a deeper understanding on how to intervene to improve fairness and diversity in the scientific community.