Covid, Gender and Publications

by Dr. Dariusz Jemielniak, Professor of Management, Kozminski University, faculty associate, Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University, Wikimedia Foundation Trustee.

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During the Covid pandemic the experiences of researchers were impacted greatly, with remote instruction and additional responsibilities associated with shutdowns and isolation. This featured article explores some of the implications for female academics.

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Contrarily to a popular assumption, early results indicate that women scholars have not published less academic articles during lockdowns. A study in the Journal of Information Science by Jemielniak et. al, relying on an analysis of over 266 thousand articles from 2019-2020 from 21 disciplines, shows that publication patterns between women and men have not differed significantly. Interestingly, though, in some disciplines the gender gap has rapidly widened: the decrease of women author's proportion was strikingly large in psychology (-74%!). Also, philosophy and mathematics had quite large drops, even though they do not require fieldwork or experiments with human subjects. The study showed also that women scholars form more diverse teams when they are in charge (first authors). The authors hypothesize that parenting may have been a factor more important than gender. It is also possible that the full impact on publication patterns will only be visible after more time.

Read the open-access article here:

Jemielniak, D., Sławska, A., & Wilamowski, M. (2022). COVID-19 effect on the gender gap in academic publishing. Journal of Information Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/01655515211068168

If you are interested in Dr. Jemielniak’s research methods, see this Methodspace interview with him about “Thick Big Data: Mixed Methods for Our Time.”

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