Lanahan Lauren, Gonzalez-Brambila Claudia, Armanios Daniel Erian
Lundquist College of Business, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, United States of America.
Department of Business Administration, Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico (ITAM), Mexico City, Mexico.
PLoS One. 2025 Aug 14;20(8):e0324464. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0324464. eCollection 2025.
Gender inequality in the sciences remains a persistent issue. Women are often unable to participate in the scientific process as easily as men. When they do, this is largely constricted to opportunities at the lower rather than higher ranks of academia. This gap not only sets back female scientists but also scientific and social progress, more generally. The objective of this study is to look at a prominent national program for researchers in Mexico - Sistema Nacional de Investigadores (SNI) - to assess additional productivity and promotion heterogeneity by gender across career trajectories and disciplinary boundaries. Tracing productivity and promotion activity for 18,799 researchers active in the SNI program from 1991 to 2011, the analysis uncovers the following: while female researchers are associated with more productivity than males at each stage of the program, they are less likely to attain higher levels of promotion as they progress through their career. Illustratively, our more conservative results indicate women are associated with 1.2 more publications than men the year prior to promotion to Level 2 from Level 1 in SNI. Yet, 13 percent of women are associated with Level 2 promotion compared to 22 percent of men. To contextualize our understanding of these patterns, we interviewed SNI participants and include empirical assessments to unpack what may explain these perplexing results. While significant female representation in the applicant pool is needed to improve the gender gap, only a marginal increase in the gender representation of the reviewer pool is needed to reduce it significantly. This result points to a novel underexplored mechanism to inform future studies and policy - that of evaluative salience. While this does not fully address gender bias in the sciences, a shift in salience from applicants to reviewers may be an important precursor to address more structural ills around gender inequality.
科学领域的性别不平等仍然是一个长期存在的问题。女性往往无法像男性那样轻松地参与科学进程。即便她们能够参与，也大多局限于学术界较低而非较高层级的机会。这种差距不仅阻碍了女科学家的发展，更广泛地说，也阻碍了科学和社会的进步。本研究的目的是考察墨西哥一项针对研究人员的著名国家计划——国家研究人员系统（SNI）——以评估在不同职业轨迹和学科界限中，按性别划分的额外生产力和晋升差异。通过追踪1991年至2011年期间活跃于SNI计划的18799名研究人员的生产力和晋升活动，分析发现：虽然在该计划的每个阶段，女性研究人员的生产力都高于男性，但随着职业发展，她们获得更高晋升水平的可能性较小。举例来说，我们较为保守的结果表明，在SNI中从1级晋升到2级的前一年，女性比男性多发表1.2篇论文。然而，只有13%的女性获得了2级晋升，而男性的这一比例为22%。为了更好地理解这些模式，我们采访了SNI的参与者，并进行实证评估以剖析可能解释这些令人困惑结果的原因。虽然需要在申请人池中增加女性的显著比例来改善性别差距，但只需在评审人员池中略微增加性别代表性就能显著缩小这一差距。这一结果指向了一个新颖且未被充分探索的机制，可为未来的研究和政策提供参考——即评价显著性。虽然这并不能完全解决科学领域的性别偏见问题，但从申请人到评审人员的显著性转变可能是解决围绕性别不平等的更多结构性问题的重要先兆。
