RT Journal Article
T1 Mind the gender gap: COVID-19 lockdown effects on gender differences in preprint submissions
A1 Úcar Marques, Iñaki
A1 Torre Fernández, Margarita
A1 Elías Fernández, Antonio
AB The gender gap is a well-known problem in academia and, despite its gradual narrowing, recent estimations indicate that it will persist for decades. Short-term descriptive studies suggest that this gap may have actually worsened during the months of confinement following the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. In this work, we evaluate the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on female and male academics' research productivity using preprint drop-off data. We examine a total of 307,902 unique research articles deposited in 5 major preprint repositories during the period between January and May each year from 2017 to 2020. We find that the proportion of female authors in online repositories steadily increased over time; however, the trend reversed during the confinement and gender parity worsened in two respects. First, the proportion of male authors in preprints increased significantly during lockdown. Second, the proportion of male authors in COVID-19-related articles was significantly higher than that of women. Overall, our results imply that the gender gap in academia suffered an approximately 1-year setback during the strict lockdown months of 2020, and COVID-related research areas suffered an additional 1.5-year setback.
PB Public Library of Science
SN 1932-6203
YR 2022
FD 2022-03-01
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10016/38493
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10016/38493
LA eng
NO This work has been supported by theMadrid Government (Comunidad de Madrid) underthe Multiannual Agreement with UC3M in the lineof "Fostering Young Doctors Research"(CONCIERGE-CM-UC3M), and in the context of theV PRICIT (Regional Programme of Research andTechnological Innovation. M.T. and I.U. alsoacknowledge support from the Spanish Ministry ofScience and Innovation through the research grantRTI2018-098182-A-I00.
DS e-Archivo
RD 17 jul. 2024