Women’s Contribution to Knowledge Production: Bibliometric Analysis of Economic Sciences

Abstract

There is a widespread stereotype that women are inferior to men in scientific activity, which is usually explained by the high workload in the administrative and pedagogical spheres, where the majority of women in higher education work, as well as with the double burden. This study assesses women’s contribution to science and its comparison with men’s contribution using the case of economics. The research is based on unique bibliometric data provided by the Russian Scientific Electronic Library and the Russian Index of Science Citation. Data on the publication activity and citation rate of authors, measured using the Hirsch index, demonstrate that the female contribution, measured using the average publication activity, is higher than the male one. The database contains more female publications in general, including publications extracted from the lists of cited literature, articles in popular science, information publications, non-journal publications (monographs, articles in collections, conference proceedings, dissertations, patents, etc.) and publications in which the given scientist participated as an editor, compiler, translator, etc., as well as other articles in journals and collections and in journals and also from RSCI, Web of Science and Scopus databases. The first year of publication of the author indicates that the Hirsch index and the core Hirsch index are higher for men due to publications of the 19th and first half of the 20th century, mainly foreign ones, whereas in the sample with only authors whose first year of publication was not earlier than 1970, the core Hirsch index is leveled out. Nevertheless, regression analysis indicates that the author’s gender remains an important characteristic for citation in journals from core collection.