Gender Diversity Statements

Recent work in several fields of science has identified a bias in citation practices such that papers from women and other minorities are under-cited relative to the number of such papers in the field [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. We seek to proactively consider choosing references that reflect the diversity of the field in thought, form of contribution, gender, and other factors. We obtained predicted gender of the first and last author of each reference by using databases that store the probability of a name being carried by a woman [5, 6]. This method is limited in that a) names, pronouns, and social media profiles used to construct the databases may not, in every case, be indicative of gender identity and b) it cannot account for intersex, non-binary, or transgender people. We look forward to future work that could help us to better understand how to support equitable practices in science.

References

[1] S.M. Mitchell, S. Lange, & H. Brus (2013). Gendered citation patterns in international relations journals. International Studies Perspectives, 14(4):485-492.
[2] M.L. Dion, J.L. Sumner, & S.M. Mitchell (2018). Gendered citation patterns across political science and social science methodology fields. Political Analysis, 26(3): 312-327.
[3] N. Caplar, S. Tacchella, & S. Birrer (2017). Quantitative evaluation of gender bias in astronomical publications from citation counts. Nature Astronomy, 1(6): 0141.
[4] D. Maliniak, R. Powers, & B.F. Walter (2013). The gender citation gap in international relations. International Organization, 67(4): 889-922.
[5] J.D. Dworkin, K.A. Linn, E.G. Teich, P. Zurn, R.T. Shinohara, & D.S. Bassett (2020). The extent and drivers of gender imbalance in neuroscience reference lists. Nature Neuroscience.
[6] D. Zhou, E.J. Cornblath, J. Stiso, E.G. Teich, J.D. Dworkin, A.S. Blevins, & D.S. Bassett (2020). Gender diversity statement and code note-book v1.0.