Scientific Research on COVID-19 in Ibero-America. An Analysis with a Gender Perspective

Authors

Keywords:

inequality, gender gap, scientific publications, bibliometry, text mining, COVID-19

Abstract

This article aims to describe the gender gap in Ibero-American scientific research on COVID-19 through the identification of the dynamics of participation of male and female authors and their co-participation in scientific publications on the subject indexed in Scopus between 2020 and 2021. In addition, it seeks to expose the main research topics related to their approach to the virus. Sex classification algorithms were used to determine the authorship of the articles and concept maps to relate the research topics in the publications of this period. The results show that the gender gap is still ample in the academic field: although co-publication between male and female authors occurs in more than 50% of publications, men participate in 83% of them while women only do so in 69%, being 31% of publications produced only by male authors. Women also connect more with each other to publish. Althougth the research focused mainly on the treatment of patients and the management of health systems, it should also be noted that other problems appeared in female publications, related to care, education and violence.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biographies

Laura Osorio, Organización de Estados Iberoamericanos (OEI)

Observatorio Iberoamericano de la Ciencia, la Tecnología y la Sociedad (OCTS) de la Organización de Estados Iberoamericanos (OEI).

Juan Pablo Sokil, Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA)

Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), Argentina.

References

Amano-Patiño, N., Faraglia, E., Giannitsarou, C. y Hasna, Z. (2020). Who is doing new research in the time of COVID-19? Not the female economists. VoxEU & CEPR. Recuperado de: https://voxeu.org/article/who-doing-new-research-time-covid-19-not-female-economists.

Albornoz, M., Barrere, R., Matas, L., Osorio, L. y Sokil, J. (2018). Las brechas de género en la producción científica iberoamericana. El Estado de la Ciencia. Principales indicadores de ciencia y tecnología Iberoamericanos/Interamericanos (31-46). Buenos Aires: RICYT. Recuperado de: http://www.ricyt.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/www.ricyt_.org_files_edlc_2018.pdf.

Colleen F. (2020). Women Are Falling Behind. Inside Higher Ed. Recuperado de: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/10/20/large-scale-study-backs-other-research-showing-relative-declines-womens-research.

DeFilippis, E., Sinnenberg, L., Mahmud, N., Wood, M., Hayes, S., Michos, E. y Reza, N. (2021). Gender Differences in Publication Authorship During COVID‐19: A Bibliometric Analysis of High‐Impact Cardiology Journals. NCBI. Recuperado de: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8174290/.

De Kleijn, M., Jayabalasingham, B., Falk-Krzesinski, H. J., Collins, T., Kuiper-Hoyng, L., Cingolani, I., Zhang, J. y Roberge, G. (2020). The Researcher Journey Through a Gender Lens: An Examination of Research Participation, Career Progression and Perceptions Across the Globe. Elsevier. Recuperado de www.elsevier.com/gender-report.

Deryugina, T., Shurchkov, O. y Stearns, J. (2021). Covid-19 disruptions disproportionately affect female academics. NBER Working Paper Series. Recuperado de: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28360/w28360.pdf.

Edelman, A., Boniface, E., Benhar, E., Han, L., Matteson, K., Favaro, C., Pearson, J. y Darney, B. (2022). Association Between Menstrual Cycle Length and Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Vaccination. Obstetrics & Gynecology, 0(0), 1-9. DOI: 10.1097/AOG.0000000000004695.

Elsevier (2020). The Researcher Journey Through a Gender Lens. An examination of research participation, career progression and perceptions across the globe. Recuperado de: https://www.elsevier.com/research-intelligence/resource-library/gender-report-2020.

Feeney, M. y Bernal, M. (2010). Women in STEM networks: Who seeks advice and support from women scientists? Scientometrics, 85, 767-790.

Flores Espínola, A. (2010). Mujeres y feminismo en ciencia y tecnología: un análisis de revistas científicas. En M. Navarro, B. Estévez Cedeño y A. Sánchez Cuervo (Eds.), Claves actuales de pensamiento, (171-194). Madrid: CSIC.

Flores Espínola, A. (2013). Metodología feminista: ¿una transformación de prácticas científicas? (Tesis doctoral). Madrid: Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Recuperado de: https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/tesis?codigo=98676.

Flores Espínola, A. (2016). ¿Los estudios CTS tienen un sexo? Mujeres y género en la investigación académica. Revista Iberoamericana de Ciencia, Tecnología y Sociedad -CTS, 31(11), 61-92.

Frederickson, M. (2020). COVID-19’s gendered impact on academic productivity. Recuperado de: https://github.com/drfreder/pandemic-pub-bias/blob/master/README.md.

Fruchterman, T. M. y Reingold, E. M. (1991). Graph drawing by force‐directed placement. Software: Practice and experience, 21(11), 1129-1164.

González, M. y Fernández Jimeno, N. (2016). Ciencia, tecnología y género. Enfoques y problemas actuales. Revista Iberoamericana de Ciencia, Tecnología y Sociedad -CTS, 31(11), 51-60.

Graham, R.L. & Hell, Pavol. (1985). On the History of the Minimum Spanning Tree Problem. Annals of the History of Computing, 7, 43-57. DOI: 10.1109/MAHC.1985.10011.

Johnson, E. (2020). The Impact of Covid-19 on Women Scientists from Developing Countries: Results from an OWSD Member Survey. OWSD. Recuperado de: https://www.owsd.net/news/news-events/impact-covid-19-women-scientists-developing-countries-results-owsd-member-survey.

Mikolov, T., Sutskever, I., Chen, K., Corrado, G. S. y Dean, J. (2013). Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality. En C. Burges, L. Bottou, M. Welling, Z. Ghahramani y K. Weinberger (Eds.), Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, Vol. 26 (3111-3119). Red Hook: Curran Associates, Inc. Recuperado de: https://arxiv.org/abs/1310.4546.

Minello, A. (2020). The pandemic and the female academic. Nature. Recuperado de: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01135-9.

Mullen, L. (2018). Gender: Predict Gender from Names Using Historical Data. R package version 0.5.2. Recuperado de: https://lincolnmullen.com/software/gender/.

Muric, G., Lerman, K. y Ferrara, E. (2021). Gender disparity in the authorship of biomedical research publications during the covid-19 pandemic: retrospective observational study. J Med Internet Res, 23(4), e25379. DOI: 10.2196/25379.

Penner, A. M. (2015). Gender inequality in science. Science, 347(6219), 234–235. DOI: 10.1126/science.aaa3781.

Pinho-Gomes, A., Peters, S., Thompson, K., Hockham, C., Ripullone, K., Woodward, M. y Carcel, C. (2020). Where are the women? Gender inequalities in COVID-19 research authorship. BMJ Global Health 2020, 5, e002922. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2020-002922.

Pons, P. y Latapy, M. (2005). Computing communities in large networks using random walks. International symposium on computer and information sciences (284-293). Berlín: Springer.

Sáez, C. (2020). ¿Dónde están las científicas en la pandemia? La covid-19 las borra del mapa. Agencia SINC. Recuperado de: https://www.agenciasinc.es/Reportajes/Donde-estan-las-cientificas-en-la-pandemia-La-covid-19-las-borra-del-mapa.

Squazzoni, F., Bravo, G., Grimaldo, F., García-Costa, D., Farjam, M. y Mehmani, B. (2021). Gender gap in journal submissions and peer review during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. A study on 2329 Elsevier journals. Plos One, 1-17. Recuperado de: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0257919.

Sokil, J. P. y Osorio, L. (2022). Producción científica en el campo de los estudios de género:

análisis de revistas seleccionadas de Web Of Science (2008-2018). Revista Española de Documentación Científica, 45(1), e3120. DOI: https://doi.org/ 10.3989/redc.2022.1.1849.

Sokil, J. P. y Osorio, L. (2021). Mujeres científicas iberoamericanas: su producción y redes de participación. Congreso Iberoamericano de Ciencia, Tecnología y Género 2021, en prensa. Recuperado de: https://www.academia.edu/68837353/Mujeres_cient%C3%ADficas_iberoamericanas_su_producci%C3%B3n_y_redes_de_participaci%C3%B3n.

Shurchkov, O. (2020). Is COVID-19 turning back the clock on gender equality in academia? Medium. Recuperado de: https://medium.com/@olga.shurchkov/is-covid-19-turning-back-the-clock-on-gender-equality-in-academia-70c00d6b8ba1.

Thelwall, M., Bailey, C., Tobin, C. y Bradshaw, N. (2019). Gender differences in research areas, methods and topics: Can people and thing orientations explain the results? Journal of Informetrics, 13(1), 149-169. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2018.12.002.

UNESCO (2021). La pandemia de Covid-19 afecta desproporcionadamente a las mujeres en ciencia e ingeniería. Recuperado de: https://en.unesco.org/news/covid-19-pandemic-disproportionately-affecting-women-science-and-engineering

UNESCO (2017). Plan de acción de la UNESCO, para la prioridad «Igualdad de Género». Recuperado de: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000227222_spa.

UNESCO (2019). Women in Science (Fact Sheet 2019 FS/2019/SCI/55). Recuperado de: http://uis.unesco.org/sites/default/files/documents/fs55-women-in-science-2019-en.pdf.

Viglione, G. (2020). Are women publishing less during the pandemic? Here’s what the data say. Nature. Recuperado de: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01294-9.

Vincent-Lamarre, P., Sugimoto, C. y Larivière, V. (2020). The decline of women's research production during the coronavirus pandemic. Nature Index. Recuperado de: https://www.natureindex.com/news-blog/decline-women-scientist-research-publishing-production-coronavirus-pandemic.

Xu, Y. J., y Martin, C. L. (2011). Gender differences in STEM disciplines: From the aspects of informal professional networking and faculty career development. Gender Issues, 28, 134–154. DOI: 10.1007/s12147-011-9104-5.

Downloads

Published

2022-03-23

How to Cite

Osorio, L., & Sokil, J. P. (2022). Scientific Research on COVID-19 in Ibero-America. An Analysis with a Gender Perspective. Revista Iberoamericana De Ciencia, Tecnología Y Sociedad - CTS (Ibero-American Science, Technology and Society Journal), 17(49). Retrieved from https://ojs.revistacts.net/index.php/CTS/article/view/273

Issue

Section

Dossier