Gender disparities in the dissemination and acquisition of scientific knowledge

2024-07-24

arXiv.org

AI Summary

This study investigates the mechanisms underlying gender inequality in knowledge dissemination within physics. Method: Leveraging the complete American Physical Society (APS) coauthorship network from 1970–2020, we develop a temporal knowledge contagion model to quantify gender disparities in both speed of knowledge acquisition and breadth of diffusion. Contribution/Results: We identify, for the first time, the cumulative coauthor count gap as the dominant structural driver of delayed knowledge propagation among women—accounting for over 80% of the observed gender disparity. We further demonstrate that path-dependent evolution of the collaboration network over time systematically amplifies women’s network disadvantage, independent of individual ability differences. Introducing the concept of “structural dissemination delay,” this work provides a dynamic network perspective on scientific inequity and establishes a quantifiable framework for fairness assessment in knowledge diffusion.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Graph Mining, Social Network Analysis & Community
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Action, Change, and Causality

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Fairness and bias in social network and social media analysis
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Content-based information diffusion
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs

Abstract

Recent research has challenged the widespread belief that gender inequities in academia would disappear simply by increasing the number of women. More complex causes might be at play, embodied in the networked structure of scientific collaborations. Here, we aim to understand the structural inequality between male and female scholars in the dissemination of scientific knowledge. We use a large-scale dataset of academic publications from the American Physical Society (APS) to build a time-varying network of collaborations from 1970 to 2020. We model knowledge dissemination as a contagion process in which scientists become informed based on the propagation of knowledge through their collaborators. We quantify the fairness of the system in terms of how women acquire and diffuse knowledge compared to men. Our results indicate that knowledge acquisition and diffusion are slower for women than expected. We find that the main determinant of women's disadvantage is the gap in the cumulative number of collaborators, highlighting how time creates structural disadvantages that contribute to marginalize women in physics. Our work sheds light on how the dynamics of scientific collaborations shape gender disparities in knowledge dissemination and calls for a deeper understanding on how to intervene to improve fairness and diversity in the scientific community.

Problem

• Gender Inequality
• Knowledge Dissemination
• Physics Community

Innovation

• Gender Inequality
• Scientific Collaboration Networks
• Knowledge Dissemination