Carole Lee: Gender-based homophily in collaborations across a heterogeneous scholarly landscape

The tendency to associate with individuals of the same gender creates profound divisions within professional and social contexts. We investigate this tendency within scientific co-authorships using the JSTOR corpus of articles. We distinguish three components of gender homophily in collaborations: a structural component that is due to demographics and non-gendered authorship norms of a scientific community, a compositionalcomponent which is driven by varying gender representation across subdisciplines, and a behavioral component which we define as the remainder of observed homophily after its structural and compositional components have been taken into account. We find that significant behavioral homophily can be detected across the JSTOR corpus and show that this finding is robust to missing gender indicators in our data. In a secondary analysis, we show that the proportion of female representation in a field is positively associated with significant behavioral homophily.

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Carole Lee

Associate Professor, University of Washington

Carole Lee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Washington. She studies the formal and informal processes of peer evaluation that allocate limited scholarly resources such as co-authorships, publication pages, grant awards, and scientific prizes. She has worked with the National Institutes of Health and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation to study their grant evaluation processes and published in journals reaching philosophical and broad scientific and biomedical audiences (e.g., Science, The Lancet).Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Mellon and Woodrow Wilson Foundations (through a Career Enhancement Fellowship). She received First Prize for most creative submission to NIH’s Peer Review Challenge (with her collaborator Elena Erosheva).