Abstract
Gender disparities persist in several areas of society and scientific research is no exception. This study describes the evolution of the place of women in Russian science from 1973 to 2012, in terms of published research output, research productivity, international and national collaboration, and scientific impact, taking into account the socioeconomic, political and historic context of the country, which was marked by the fall of the USSR in 1991. The results show that gender parity is far from being achieved. Women remain underrepresented in terms of their contribution to research output and scientific impact in almost all disciplines, with Mathematics and Physics, research areas in which Russia is specialized, having the largest gap. Men and women show different collaboration patterns on the national and international level, whereas women are preeminent on the national scene, men are on the international one. Although the impact of women’s scientific output significantly increases after the fall of the USSR, the gap between both genders remains stable over time for most of the disciplines. As a result, this increase cannot be interpreted as an improvement of the women’s relative influence in Russian science, but rather an improvement of Russian science impact in general.
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Notes
Suffixes associated to male gender: -ov, -in, -ev, -ky, -kii, -kiy, -yi, -ny, -oy, -oi, except -tsoi and –tsoy.
Suffixes associated to female gender: -ova, -ina, -eva, -aia and –aya.
Given that pre-2008 papers do not have a link between authors and addresses, it possible that we assigned a gender to a foreign collaborator rather than a Russian author. Given the low international collaboration rate of Russian papers, however, this should not be frequent.
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A preliminary version of this paper will be presented to the STI 2014 conference.
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Paul-Hus, A., Bouvier, R.L., Ni, C. et al. Forty years of gender disparities in Russian science: a historical bibliometric analysis. Scientometrics 102, 1541–1553 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-014-1386-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-014-1386-4