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Gendered Patterns of Global Scholarly Migration: Evidence on Mobile Researchers from Bibliometric Data
Xinyi Zhao
Laboratory of Digital and Computational Demography, September 21, 2022
Xinyi Zhao from the Laboratory of Digital and Computational Demography shows that while female researchers continued to be underrepresented among internationally mobile researchers worldwide, this gender gap was narrowing at a faster rate than the gender gap in the population of general active researchers.
Abstract
Although considerable progress toward achieving gender equality in the sciences has been made in recent decades, female researchers continue to face significant barriers to participating and advancing in the academic labor market. International mobility has been increasingly recognized as a strategy that scientists can use to expand their professional networks, and that could help to narrow the gender gap in academic careers.
From the Scopus bibliometric data from 1.1 million researchers who have published at least once with an affiliation address from Germany in 1996–2020, she observed international mobility may play in helping to moderate some of the most extreme gender disparities in some disciplines. When considering the migration trajectories, however, the return migration streams to Germany are more gender imbalanced, compared to those who remain in Germany and those who emigrate. Motivated by the case study in Germany, she extended the dataset to over 33 million Scopus publications from 10 million published researchers worldwide, and provide the first global and dynamic view of gendered patterns of transnational scholarly mobility, as measured by volume, diversity, and distribution.
She finds that while female researchers continued to be underrepresented among internationally mobile researchers worldwide, this gender gap was narrowing at a faster rate than the gender gap in the population of general active researchers. Globally, the origin and destination countries of both female and male mobile researchers became increasingly diversified. However, the range of origin and destination countries continued to be narrower for women than for men. While the US remained the leading academic destination worldwide, the shares of both female and male scholarly inflows to that country declined from around 25% to 20% over the study period, partially as a result of the growing relevance of China. Researchers of both genders also became more evenly dispersed across destination countries over time, which suggests that scholarly migration has become less skewed and more globalized. This study in the global setting offers a cross-national measurement of gender inequality in international scholarly migration that is essential for promoting gender-equitable science policies, and for monitoring the impact of such interventions.
About
Xinyi Zhao is currently a doctoral student in the Lab of Digital and Computational Demography here at the institute and is also affiliated with the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford. Her main research interests include applying digital and computational innovations (e.g. new types of data and methods) in demography and social science, with a particular interest in gender disparity and migration. She is also interested in the methods of scientometrics, spatial data analysis, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS).