A study by Kobe University, Tokyo Institute of Technology, State University of New York, and Kyoto University found that the gender gap in Japan's academic world is large and unique compared to China and South Korea.
In East Asian countries, including Japan, China, and South Korea (hereinafter referred to as Japan, China, and South Korea), there is much evidence that women's social advancement is lagging behind Europe and the United States, and large gender differences have become a social issue. . A similar trend is expected in academia, but to date, gender differences in East Asian academia have not been sufficiently studied.
This research group uses data on approximately 1950 million papers published from 2020 to 1 to investigate gender differences in the number of researchers in Japan, China, and Korea, gender differences in the careers of individual researchers, and the We analyzed gender differences in the number of citations and citations of papers.
The results revealed that the gender gap in the number of researchers (more men) was greater in Japan than in China and South Korea. The gender gap in the number of papers published by individual researchers over the course of their careers (more for men) was also significantly larger in Japan than in other countries. On the other hand, since there was almost no gender difference in the number of papers published per year between countries, it is thought that the gender difference in the number of papers published is due to gender differences in the length of individual researchers' careers (in fact, male researchers career is longer than that of female researchers). In terms of citation impact (an indicator based on the number of citations a published paper receives), it was also found that men in Japan had a higher rate of citation impact than women, but the opposite was true in China and South Korea.
Finally, we analyzed gender differences in the number of paper citations and citations. Among papers from Japan, China, and South Korea, there is a tendency for male-led papers in which a man is the main author (first or last author) to be over-cited, while there is a tendency for papers led by women to be under-cited. , was the largest in Japan compared to China and South Korea.
The above results indicate that the gender gap in Japan's academic world is larger than in other countries, and that women tend to lag behind men. It is hoped that this result will lead to the promotion of efforts to improve gender disparities in Japan's academic world.
Paper information:[Journal of Informetrics] Quantifying gender imbalance in East Asian academia: Research career and citation practice
