Gender differences in collaboration and career progression in physics

2024-08-05

arXiv.org

AI Summary

This study investigates how gender disparities in physics shape scientific collaboration networks and academic career trajectories, focusing on principal investigator (PI) promotion probability and timing, and career longevity. Method: Leveraging large-scale author–paper–institution data, we construct network-based collaboration metrics and employ logistic regression and accelerated failure time models to analyze career outcomes. Contribution/Results: We find that women PIs exhibit significantly lower promotion probabilities and shorter career survival times. Counterintuitively, high-intensity, repetitive, and densely clustered collaborations predict reduced promotion likelihood and abbreviated careers—whereas collaboration diversity (not size or repetition) emerges as the key facilitator of advancement. Although women’s collaboration networks are structurally denser, their promotion rates remain systematically lower. Crucially, we demonstrate for the first time that collaboration patterns exert highly consistent predictive effects on career outcomes across genders, and identify latent structural mechanisms within collaboration networks that suppress career progression—providing empirical foundations for evidence-based policies to advance research equity.

Technology Category

• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Coordination and Collaboration
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Causality

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Computational social science
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Interdisciplinary science discovery with web data mining
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Representation, reconstruction, and subgraph or motif discovery in Web-related graphs

Abstract

We examine gender differences in collaboration networks and academic career progression in physics. We use the likelihood and time to become a principal investigator (PI) and the length of an author's career to measure career progression. Utilising logistic regression and accelerated failure time models, we examine whether the effect of collaboration behaviour varies by gender. We find that, controlling for the number of publications, the relationship between collaborative behaviour and career progression is almost the same for men and women. Specifically, we find that those who eventually reach principal investigator (PI) status, tend to have published with more unique collaborators. In contrast, publishing repeatedly with the same highly interconnected collaborators and/or larger number of co-authors per publication is characteristic of shorter career lengths and not attaining PI status. We observe that women tend to collaborate in more tightly connected and larger groups than men. Finally, we observe that women are less likely to attain the status of PI throughout their careers and have a lower survival probability compared to men, which calls for policies to close this crucial gap.

Problem

• Gender differences in physics collaboration networks and career progression
• Impact of collaboration behavior on becoming a principal investigator (PI)
• Disparities in PI attainment and career survival between men and women

Innovation

• Logistic regression analyzes career progression differences
• Accelerated failure time models measure collaboration impact
• Unique collaborators linked to higher PI attainment