By EWS

How to succeed in an academic career? We all know that to survive in the academic world, you have to publish. That’s the famous “Publish or perish” requisite. But that might not be all…

In their article “Collaboration enhances career progression in academic science, especially for female researchers”, van der Wal and her colleagues compare men´s and women´s engagement in scientific collaboration and examine whether reduced collaboration opportunities are holding women back. The authors’ interest for this issue came from the facts that:

– Academic collaboration fosters positive outcomes for scientists in terms of funding success, citation rates, and reputation.

– Women scientists have fewer collaboration opportunities than men. They also have a harder time advancing in their career, being underrepresented in prestigious (unique, first, or last) authorships.

A natural question that followed was whether reduced collaboration opportunities could be an obstacle for the career development of women scientists.

The study

The study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Science, analyzed the collaboration characteristics and career milestones of a cohort of researchers over almost 30 years. All were contributors to the biennial International Society of Behavioral Ecology meetings held in the 1990s.

This cohort of scientists included people from different parts of the world who investigated a diverse range of topics in ecology and evolutionary biology. In total, 935 authors of at least one publication on a relevant subject were considered. Not surprisingly, most were men (i.e., 68%).

Gender differences in productivity and academic career development

The analysis of 52,698 scientific papers corroborated a well-known gender bias in productivity. Women publish almost half as many as men on average. And, this difference holds even after controlling for possible confounding factors such as career length.

To measure career progression, van der Wal and colleagues used three criteria: career length, reaching a principal investigator (PI) position, and time to do so. To be considered as PI, the investigator had to show senior leadership in research. This was assessed through the last authorship position on at least three published papers.

The results exposed a “leaky pipeline” phenomenon in terms of career progression and likehood to stay in research. Women actually have a much harder time becoming PIs than men. They are about 25% less likely to reach this status (i.e., 63% vs. 83%). And those who do need almost 30% more time to achieve this career milestone. In addition, women are almost twice as likely to leave research than men and are still more inclined to do so after becoming PIs. Overall, their careers are 41% shorter than those of men.

Gender differences in collaboration behaviors

To determine the collaboration characteristics of men and women, van der Wal and colleagues listed the co-authors of all the scientists in their cohort. They used this list to construct social networks for the 935 scientists. Their analyses focused on the three aspects of men´s and women´s networks:

– The size of each investigator’s collaborator network; that is, the total number of co-authors.

– The strength of a researcher’s ties with his or her collaborators, as measured by the average number of publications shared by an investigator with his or her co-authors. 

– The network clustering degree, which corresponds to the connection levels among co-authors of a network. This metric estimates whether a researcher collaborates with different groups of researchers. When he/she does, his/her network has a low clustering degree, meaning that he/she has various groups of collaborators.

The results of van der Wal and colleagues are clear: women benefit from less collaboration support than men. They have smaller, less tight, and less diverse collaboration networks. They have 40% fewer co-authors than men and publish on average 10% less papers with them. And all these patterns hold even when considering the effects generated by gender differences in productivity.

The impacts of academic collaboration on career development for men and women

The study revealed numerous advantages to collaboration for both men and women scientists.

Having more and less connected collaborators increases your chances of becoming a PI and pursuing a longer scientific career. Publishing more frequently with co-authors also increases career length, and publishing with less connected researchers reduces the time to become a PI.

Early collaborations promoted longer careers. Scientists publish for longer periods of time when they have more and less connected collaborators, and when they have published with coauthors more frequently during their first ten years of career.

While academic collaboration has many similar benefits for men and women, it has an exacerbated impact on women´s career trajectories. For example, having more collaborators to publish with increases women’s career length more strongly than men’s (by 62%). In the same way, women scientists with stronger ties with their co-authors are more likely to become PIs, while this is not true for men.

Retaining women in the pipeline

“Gender diversity leads to better science” but we are still far from reaching gender equity in science.

This will necessitate the implementation of concrete actions to break down the barriers that prevent women from participating in collaboration. A number of such obstacles may exist. They include low self-esteem and confidence, difficulties traveling and making new connections, and the tendency of men and women to collaborate with people of the same gender (i.e., gender homophily).