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Do men and women differ in their use of tables and graphs in academic publications?

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Abstract

In psychological research there is huge literature on differences between the sexes. Typically it used to be thought that women were more verbally and men more spatially oriented. These differences now seem to be waning. In this article we present three studies on sex differences in the use of tables and graphs in academic articles. These studies are based on data mining from approximately 2,000 articles published in over 200 peer-reviewed journals in the sciences and social sciences. In Study 1 we found that, in the sciences, men used 26 % more graphs and figures than women, but that there were no significant differences between them in their use of tables. In Study 2 we found no significant differences between men and women in their use of graphs and figures or tables in social science articles. In Study 3 we found no significant differences between men and women in their use of what we termed ‘data’ and ‘text’ tables in social science articles. It is possible that these findings indicate that academic writing is now becoming a genre that is equally undertaken by men and women.

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Notes

  1. Holpuch (2013) reports a recent news item stressing the sexist mindset of some people about women in Science: “to the apparent shock of some Facebook users, girls can be quite good at science.”

  2. http://webofknowledge.com/JCR/JCR.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Psychology, Keele University, Staffordshire, UK

    James Hartley

  2. Computer Science Department, IRIT UMR 5505 CNRS, University of Toulouse, 118 route de Narbonne, 31062, Toulouse Cedex 9, France

    Guillaume Cabanac

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  1. James Hartley
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  2. Guillaume Cabanac
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Correspondence to Guillaume Cabanac.

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Hartley, J., Cabanac, G. Do men and women differ in their use of tables and graphs in academic publications?. Scientometrics 98, 1161–1172 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1096-3

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