Effects of Inferred Gender on Patterns of Co‐Authorship in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Publications
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Senior positions in academia such as tenured faculty and editorial positions often exhibit large gender imbalances across a broad range of research disciplines. The forces driving these imbalances have been the subject of extensive speculation and a more modest body of research. Given the central role publications play in determining individual outcomes and progress in academic settings, unequal patterns of authorship across gender could be a potent driver of observed gender imbalance in academia. Here, we investigate patterns of co‐authorship across four journals in ecology and evolutionary biology at four time‐points spanning four decades. Co‐authorship patterns are of interest because collaborations are important in scientific research, affecting individual researcher productivity, and increasingly, funding opportunities. Based on inferred gender from set criteria, we found significant differences between male and female researchers in their tendency to publish with female co‐authors. Specifically, compared to women, male researchers in the last author position were more likely to co‐author papers with other males. While we did find that the proportion of female co‐authors has increased modestly over the last thirty years, this is strongly correlated with an increase in the average number of authors per paper over time. Additionally, the proportion of female co‐authors on papers remains well below the proportion of PhDs awarded to females in biology.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.014 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".