Female researchers close global mobility gap on men

Female researchers have been less internationally mobile than their male colleagues, but the gender mobility gap is closing, according to a study based on authors’ institutional affiliations.

The authors of a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on 27 February found that the mobility gap shrank faster than the gender gap in the total number of researchers.

Using Scopus data from 1998 to 2017, covering 33 million articles and 10 million researchers, they found that about 50,000 more female researchers moved countries for work, with the share of female researchers doing so rising from 4.3 per cent to 4.6 per cent worldwide. At the same time, the number of mobile men grew by 75,000, although the share doing so fell slightly, from 6 per cent to 5.6 per cent.

Among migrant researchers only, the gap between the gender ratios shrank from 0.42 to 0.24, although women still tended to travel less far, to a smaller range of destinations, and come from fewer origin countries.

The information on author affiliation covers a time when researchers in general travelled ever further for work, with the Scopus data showing that men tended to trek further than women, except for those from China and South Korea – women from those two countries went further on average.

Most nations tended to receive researchers from and to disperse them across a consistent spread of countries – with the US topping the diversity table for both. South Korea was unusual in dramatically increasing the diversity of its origin and destination countries, although a gender gap in the range of countries persisted.

Both male and female researchers from China, in contrast, have tended to concentrate on an increasingly narrow pool of destination countries. Those travelling to China have also come from a dwindling number of origin countries, the authors found.

The most popular destination countries for roving researchers – which tended to be in western Europe or North America – were similar for either gender, but there was more variation further down the table, with Japan being favoured by men and Italy and Spain by women.

In the case of Japan, Xinyi Zhao, an author and PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science at the University of Oxford, said: “Maybe it’s not easy for them to attract other female researchers because the scientific system is not very favourable to female researchers.” She added that conditions and dedicated programmes could attract or deter migrants.

The authors clustered countries into three groups: those with few female researchers and low female mobility, such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and South Korea; those with global median figures for both female researchers and their mobility, such as the US, the UK, Canada and Germany; and those with the most mobile women and gender balance among researchers, like Serbia, Argentina and Portugal.

Ms Zhao said she had at her institute many female colleagues from South America, some of whom reported difficult conditions as a push factor for leaving, rather than citing the attractiveness of their destination. Those conversations show the limits of the Scopus data, which do not include nationality – allowing returnees to be identified – and requires gender to be inferred from names. Transliteration from Mandarin made some author names ambiguous, but the study authors said switching the gender of those names did not alter their overall findings.

An institutional affiliation says nothing about researchers’ reasons for migrating. To help tease out some of that detail, Ms Zhao wants to link the huge Scopus institutional affiliation dataset – which allows the identification of individual researchers – with a survey of 1.5 million active scientists that also covers parenthood and productivity.

She said some countries showed a narrowing of the destinations that female researchers travelled to, suggesting a need for more countries to adopt female-friendly research policies.

In general, researchers from high-income countries tended to travel to other wealthy nations, while those from lower-income countries went to a broader range of destinations. Policymakers in both types of country should consider more support for returnees, a form of migration that can benefit sending and receiving countries, Ms Zhao added.

ben.upton@timeshighereducation.com