Ucar Iñaki, Torre Margarita, Elías Antonio
UC3M-Santander Big Data Institute, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Getafe, Spain.
Department of Social Sciences, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Getafe, Spain.
PLoS One. 2022 Mar 25;17(3):e0264265. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0264265. eCollection 2022.
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.
性别差距是学术界一个众所周知的问题，尽管它在逐渐缩小，但最近的估计表明，这种差距将持续数十年。短期描述性研究表明，在2020年新冠疫情爆发后的封锁月份里，这种差距实际上可能已经恶化。在这项工作中，我们使用预印本投递数据评估了新冠疫情封锁对男女学者研究生产力的影响。我们研究了2017年至2020年每年1月至5月期间存放在5个主要预印本库中的307,902篇独特的研究文章。我们发现，在线库中女性作者的比例随着时间的推移稳步上升；然而，在封锁期间这一趋势发生了逆转，性别平等在两个方面有所恶化。第一，封锁期间预印本中男性作者的比例显著增加。第二，新冠相关文章中男性作者的比例明显高于女性。总体而言，我们的结果表明，学术界的性别差距在2020年严格封锁的几个月里遭受了大约1年的挫折，而新冠相关研究领域又遭受了额外1.5年的挫折。
