iranian women in science: a gender study of scientific productivity in an islamic country

7/27/2019 Iranian women in science: a gender study of scientific productivity in an Islamic country

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Iranian women in science:a gender study of scientific

productivity in an Islamic countryMehrnoush Mozaffarian

CIBER, School of Library, Archive and Information Studies (SLAIS),University College London, London, UK, and

Hamid R. JamaliCIBER, Department of Educational Technology,

Faculty of Psychology and Education, Tarbiat Moallem University, Tehran, Iran

AbstractPurpose The aim of the paper is to explore and test gender differences in the authorship of Iranian

journal articles.

Design/methodology/approach A list of articles published by Iranian authors in ISI journals in2003 was obtained from the Web of Science. The names of authors were searched in a specific databaseas well as the web to find their first names and hence their gender. The articles were then broken downby gender and subject category. International collaborations of the authors were also investigated.

Findings The productivity of female authors at the individual level as measured by articleper author share was lower than male authors. In total, females accounted for 6 per cent and males for94 per cent of the articles published in 2003. A chi-square test showed that female contribution wassignificantly lower than expected.

Originality/value The study is the first to investigate gender participation in scientificproductivity in Iran and most likely in a Muslim country. The article highlights the need forqualitative studies on the gender aspect of scientific productivity in Muslim countries.

Keywords Productivity rate, Research work, Academic staff, Gender, Women, Iran

Paper type Research paper

IntroductionUnderstanding the gender distribution of scientific production at national orinstitutional level is an important issue in the sociology of science and also for policymakers and decision makers in higher education and the labour market. Severalnational and international policies and strategies[1] have been developed to examineand improve womens opportunity in academic research and publication, and it istherefore necessary to devise means to monitor their success (Leta, 2003, p. 340).

It is also important for supporting the growing social and political commitment topromote and monitor womens participation in the different fields of science.

This issue is more critical in countries with low gender-related developmentindex[2] (GDI), such as developing countries and even more critical in Islamiccountries where women are thought to be facing limitations for participating in society.Iran is one of these countries whose GDI is ranked 94 among 177 countries[3]

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at

www.emeraldinsight.com/0001-253X.htm

The authors would like to thank Dr Ian Rowlands for his invaluable suggestions.

Iranian womenin science

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Received 6 April 2008Revised 7 May 2008

Accepted 15 May 2008

Aslib Proceedings: New Information

Perspectives

Vol. 60 No. 5, 2008

pp. 463-473

q Emerald Group Publishing Limited

0001-253X

DOI 10.1108/00012530810908193


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(Human Development Report, 2008). To gain a better understanding of theparticipation of women in Iranian scientific production, this paper investigatesarticles published in ISI ranked journals. The study contributes in the less-researchedfield of the gender study in scientific productivity. The study will shed some light on

the situation of womens contribution in science in an ambitious Islamic country.

Some background on IranIran is a developing country with a population of slightly more than 70 million people.The importance of scientific development has increased in the eyes of Iranian statesmenin the last decade. Iran is investing heavily in science now, after decades of neglect andscience spending has climbed steadily, from about 0.2 per cent of gross domestic productin 1990 to 0.65 per cent in 2005 (Stone, 2005, p. 1802). The population of Iran has nearlydoubled in less than 25 years, while the number of university students has increasedmore than ten times and 720 PhD degrees were awarded just in basic sciences during theten years prior to 2004. According to Mehrdad et al. (2004, p. 79):

[. . .

] despite the great difficulties that Iranian scientists have been facing for more than twodecades (as a consequence of a social revolution, eight years of a destructive war imposed byIraq, excessive brain drain, discriminatory practices by some international journals inpublishing Iranian articles, and unfair sanctions imposed by the industrialised countries),Irans science is still thriving.

And the number of yearly scientific publications is increasing. The growth in thenumber of students and science spending is also reflected in the number of articlespublished by Iranian scholars in international journals. Moin et al. (2005) reviewedscience production in Iran (1967-2003) and compared it with 15 countries in the year2000. During these years Irans relative share in global scientific output increased from0.0003 per cent in 1970 to 0.29 per cent in 2003. Comparing the ratio of science output to

gross national product, Iran stood at the 13th place among 16 countries in 2000.An important issue in this landscape of scientific development and productivity inIran is the participation of women in science, especially as there is much debate in thewestern media about womens rights and freedom and their contribution in the civilsociety in Islamic countries. Unlike the negative stereotype picture illustrated in thewestern media, the statistics show promising eagerness and determination amongIranian women for work in academia and research fields. The latest statistics from theStatistical Centre of Iran (2008) show that there were about 2,829,000 enrolled studentsin the academic year 2006-2007 of which 52 per cent were female and 48 per cent male.About 63,000 of these students were studying at doctorate level, an indication ofresearch potential in Iran. The number of female students has increased steadilyduring the last decade in a challenging way (Harrison, 2006). The ranks of women in

academia swelled during Khatamis two terms of presidency (of 28,000 scientists inIranian universities in 2005, 5,400 (about 19 per cent) were women; Stone, 2005, p. 1802).To put this figure in context and compare it with a developed country, about 36 per centof 111,410 full-time academic staff in the UK were female in the academic year2005-2006 (HESA, 2007).

Ghorbani and Tung (2007, p. 388) in a qualitative study showed that:

[W]omen in Iran have access to most fields of study at university and can work in mostoccupations of their choice. Furthermore, they appear to be fairly well represented,

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as compared to other Islamic nations, in the workplace, at managerial/professional positions,and in the legislature[. . .] This reality appears to run contrary to the popular perception thatwomen in these countries are fully veiled and prevented from active participation in society.In some respects, the situation of women in Iran is similar, albeit different in magnitude, to

their counterparts in high GDI countries that practice greater gender equality and haveespoused affirmative action legislation.

Aims and objectivesThe aim of the present work is to explore and test gender differences in the authorshipof Iranian journal articles. In other words, the article seeks to determine whether thescientific productivity of Iranian female scholars differs quantitatively from that ofmale scholars and if so, how. In this paper, publication of journal articles in ISI ranked

journals is considered as a valid measure of scientific productivity (Fox, 1983, p. 285).More specifically the study tries to answer the following research questions:

RQ1. What is the gender distribution of Iranian authors in ISI indexed journals in

2003?

RQ2. What is the gender distribution of Iranian authors in different subject areas?

RQ3. What is the gender distribution of Iranian authors internationalcollaboration?

RQ4. What is the relative productivity of men and women?

Literature reviewNumerous studies in the past have found that female scientists publish at slower ratesthan male scientists (Xie and Shauman, 1999, p. 10). Cole and Zuckerman (1984)characterised this gender gap in publication rates as the productivity puzzle. Ferber

(1986) conducted a citation analysis in the field of economics and Davenport and Snyder(1995) carried out a citation analysis in the field of sociology. Both studies revealed alower than expected number of female authors and also those female authors wereunder-cited, especially by male citing authors. One of the studies that showed a slowerrate of publication by women was that by Long (1992, p. 159). Long maintained that thesex of a scholar is an important source of variation in scientific productivity. Hereviewed the literature and it showed that the lower productivity of females has beenestablished in a dozen studies covering a relatively wide number of fields.

One measure for studying the relative productivity of female scholars is theirpublications. In other words, scientific productivity is measured in terms of thepublished output (Gupta et al., 1999, p. 269). Bibliometrics is one of the methods appliedfor the study of this area. However, there are not many articles on gender differences

that rely on bibliometric techniques. This might be because bibliometric studies in thisarea face a significant problem, which is identifying the gender of authors. The sourceof data in bibliometric studies is normally ISI Web of Science which does not give thefull version of authors first names[4] and this makes it hard to identify their gender.This problem is less significant in some cultures. For example, in Iceland the gender ofindividuals can be discovered by their surnames. Icelandic male surnames mostly endin sson whilst female last names end in dotti (Lewsion, 2001, p. 29). Using thismethod, Lewisons (2001) study based on ISI data showed that there has been a rise in


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female output in Iceland from 8 per cent to 30 per cent from 1980 to 2000. The resultsalso revealed that women were less likely to be working on international projectsthan men.

Many Polish names also have gender endings. For example, those whose surnames

end with -ski, -ckior -owy are male and those whose surnames end with with -ska, -ckaor -owa are female. Webster (2001) used this characteristic and studied the genderdistribution of Polish articles in the science citation index between 1980 and 1999. Thestudy showed that womens share of publications declined modestly from about35 per cent after the end of socialism but was almost back to its earlier level at the timethe study was conducted. Both in Websters and Lewisons studies there was a cleartendency for women to be relatively much more active in biomedicine and the lifesciences, and less so in the exact sciences such as physics and mathematics.

In Brazil a study (Leta, 2003) was conducted to measure the Brazilian femalecontribution in scientific production. The aim of the study was to monitor the Brazilianfemale effect in scientific production because of the several policies that had beendeveloped earlier to improve womens status in science. The study also aimed to discoverwhether there was a difference between Brazilian male and female academics publicationin the three fields of immunology, oceanology, and astronomy in terms of quality andquantity. The data for this research was obtained from the ISI Web of Science. Informationon the sex, age, and position of the authors was obtained from the Brazilian NationalCouncil for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq, Portuguese acronym).CNPq is a Brazilian federal research support agency linked to the Ministry of Science,Research and Technology of Brazil. This institute has created a database that includesgeneral information on Brazilian researchers and about 56,500 names are registered on it.The researcher created a database in MS Excel spreadsheets that was based on the dataobtained from ISI and CNPq. The result of the study suggested that men and women hadpublished a similar number of articles and they had equally collaborated with

international authors despite evidence of discrimination against women in the scientificpeer review process before publishing a paper (Leta, 2003, p. 351).

Besides quantitative studies, there have been some qualitative studies that havesought to find reasons that cause the productivity puzzle. These studies identified arange of reasons and differences that result in the productivity difference between menand women. Long (1992) tried to measure sex differences between Americanbiochemists and found indications that although females write less they write betterquality papers. Papers by females on average received more citations than those bymales. Also the smaller number of citations to womens papers was associated with thesmaller number of papers written by women not their quality.

Xie and Shaumans (1998) study concluded that women are less likely than men tohave the personal characteristics, structural positions, and facilitating resources that

are conductive to publication. A survey study of young Croatian scientists by Prpic(2002) showed that the number of scientific papers women publish is stronglyinfluenced by their position in the social organization of science. A critical review byRothausen-Vange et al. (2005) suggested that: firstly, due to various kinds of sex andgender discriminations, women have to work twice as hard for the same rewards;secondly, according to institutional pressure to hire and promote women faculty,women are held to lower productivity standards and finally, women themselves tend tochoose jobs that are more flexible and less prestigious than those men select.

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In Iran, although many scientometric studies have been carried out on knowledgeproduction (Etemad, 2003), no studies on gender participation have been conductedand the present study is the first one to investigate this area.

MethodologyThe ISI Webof Sciencedatabasewas used to identify articles published by Iranian authorsin the year 2003. The total number of articles identified was 2,782. The data were enteredinto an excel spreadsheet and a database was created for the authors of the articles.

Forenames of the authors were needed in order to identify their gender. However, inthe ISI database the forenames of the authors are not given, just the initial letter of eachforename. Therefore, authors names had to be re-searched in order to identify theirforenames and hence their gender. To do this, two methods were applied:

(1) The Iranian Ministry of Science, Research and Technology publishes adatabase (on CD-ROM) that contains a list of Iranian academics including theirdisciplines and affiliation as well as their full names. Assuming that a

considerable number of articles must have been written by academics, eachsurname was looked up in the database. Knowing the affiliation of the authorsand the initials of their forenames many authors were identified. However, someof the authors could not be identified and therefore a second method was used.

(2) General searching on the web using the google search engine was used to identifythe remaining number of the authors that could not be identified in theaforementioned database. Here, the assumption was that the articles mighthave been written by graduate students and independent researchers and thatthere might be some information available about them on the web, whether on theirpersonal homepages or the university web sites. In order to conduct the search, thesurnames were searched along with the title of thepaperusing theAND operator.

This method revealed the identity of a considerable number of authors.By using these two methods, the authors of 2,626 articles out of the total number of2,782articles, were identified by gender. The remaining articles (156) were eliminated fromthe study. Therefore, the study was carried out using a total of 2,626 articles. These wereclassified using the subject categories of the Ministry of Science,Research and Technologyin order to find out in which fields women are more (or less) active than men. Also thegender distribution of authors international collaborations was noted.

ResultsAs Table I shows, 352 articles (13.4 per cent) were found to have at least one femaleauthor, while the other 2,274 articles (86.6 per cent) were published only by men.

The total number of Iranian authors in the year of study was 4,528, which included 435(9.6 per cent) female and 4,093 (90.4 per cent) male scholars. However, in the academic year

Number Per cent

Articles with only male contribution 2,274 86.6Articles with female contribution 352 13.4Total 2,626 100

Table I.Gender distribution of

articles published byIranians in ISI journals


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2002-2003 16.45 per cent of 40,054 faculty members in Irans higher education were female(Ghiasi, 2003, p. 133). This means that 435 women contributed in 352 articles while theremaining 2,274 articles were written exclusively by men. Table II relates.

Table III presents a breakdown of the articles by the number of female authors

contributing to them. The maximum number of female authors contributing to a paperwas six and there was only one article that had six women amongst their authors; 296articles had only one female among their authors. The number of articles with two femalecontributing authors was 32 and the number of articles with three female contributingauthors was 23. In 2,274 articles no female authors contributed (86.6 per cent of all articles).

To gain a rough estimation of the amount of the contribution of female authors inthe articles, the fraction of female authors in each article was calculated (Table IV).The most common fraction of contribution was one female author collaborating withone male author (1/2 or 0.5 female ratio). Ninety-nine articles fell in this category.The second common ratio of contribution by women was one female and two maleauthors (1/3 female ratio) as 82 articles belonged to this category. There were only 25

articles that were solely written by women (1/1 female ratio).We calculated the sum of the females fractional contribution in order to gain a moreaccurate estimate of females contribution in the articles. To do this we multiplied each

Gender Number Per cent

Male 4,093 90.4Female 435 9.6Total 4,528 100

Table II.Distribution of maleand female authors

Number of articles Number of females Percentage of articles

2,274 0 86.6296 1 11.332 2 1.223 3 0.861 6 0.04Total: 2,626 100

Table III.Number of contributingfemale authors in eacharticle

Female ratio Number of articles Female ratio Number of articles

1/1 25 1/10 21/2 99 1/14 11/3 82 2/3 191/4 41 2/5 81/5 18 2/7 51/6 12 3/4 51/7 6 3/5 61/8 6 3/19 121/9 4 6/14 1

Table IV.Ratio of female authorsto the total numberof authors in articles

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female fraction by the number of articles in that category. For example, there are12 articles in the category of 1/6 female fraction, which means that womens fractionalcontribution is only 2 articles out of 12 (1/6 12 2). The sum of the fractionalcontributions for women is 147 articles, which is 6 per cent of all articles. The remaining

94 per cent of the contribution was made by men (Figure 1). We used article per authorshare as a measure of productivity at the individual level. If we divide 147 articles by thenumber of female authors (435), the result will be 0.34 articles per female author. Thesame figure for male authors (2479/4093) is 0.60 articles per male author. This indicatesthat the productivity of males at the individual level was almost twice that of females.

Table V breaks down the articles by their general subject categories. The highestnumber of articles belonged to chemistry and chemical engineering (888 articles) andthen to medicine (513 articles). The highest rate of female contribution in articlesbelonged to environmental studies as 34 per cent of them had female authors. However,it should be noted that there were only three articles published in this subject category.Apart from environmental studies, females had a considerable rate of contribution inarticles published in nutrition (30 per cent), medicine (25 per cent), biology (22 per cent),and chemistry and chemical engineering (15 per cent). The lowest rate of femalecontribution belonged to computer sciences where there were no female authors at all.The low number of women in computer sciences seems to be common in westerncountries as well (Bjorkman et al., 1998). Computer sciences were followed byagriculture, physics, metallurgy, engineering, and geology where female authorscontributed in 3, 4, 5, 6 and 6 per cent of the articles, respectively. These findings aresomewhat in line with the findings of Webster (2001) and Lewison (2001).

Using the data presented in Table IV, a line diagram (Figure 2) was generated thatillustrates the contribution of male and female authors in each subject category. Thedata were sorted so the subjects in which females had more contributions are presentedat the right end of the lines. As explained before, the diagram also shows that in

subjects such as environmental studies, nutrition, medicine, ecology and chemistrywomen are closing the gap in their contribution to publications compared with their

Figure 1.Contribution of male andfemale authors in articles

published in 2003


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male fellows, while publications in subjects such as computer sciences, agriculture,physics, metallurgy, engineering and geology are very male dominated.

The articles in the dataset were also examined to find out about patterns ofinternational collaboration among Iranian male and female scholars. As Figure 3demonstrates, women collaborated with international (non-Iranian) authors in 30 articlesfrom their total of 352 articles. This means that 8.5 per cent of their articles involvedinternational collaboration, while this figure for men was 19 per cent.

Articles withfemale

contribution

Articles solelywritten by male

authorsSubject No Per cent No Per cent Total

Chemistry and Chemical Engineering 130 15 758 85 888Medicine 128 25 385 75 513Engineering (various) 19 6 326 94 345Physics 7 4 203 96 210Mathematics 11 10 97 90 108Metallurgy 5 5 90 95 95Biology 20 22 70 78 90Agriculture 2 3 62 97 64Geology 3 6 41 93 44Educational Sciences 3 7 41 93 44Computer Sciences 0 0 31 100 31Veterinary Medicine 2 7 25 93 27

Humanities 1 8 11 92 12Nutrition 3 30 7 70 10Environmental Studies 1 34 2 66 3Other 17 12 125 88 142Total 352 13.4 2274 86.6 2626

Table V.Gender distribution ofarticles published byIranian authors bysubject category

Figure 2.Comparison of male andfemale productivity indifferent subjects

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Discussion and conclusionsThe study shows that Iranian women appear to be less active in exact sciences such as

physics and mathematics and more active in certain areas of life sciences such as

medicine and biology. They are also less likely than men to collaborate with

non-Iranian authors. Women contributed in 13.4 per cent (352 from the total of 2,626) of

the articles published by Iranian scholars in 2003 and in this contribution they only

accounted for 0.34 of the contributing authors. At the individual level, the productivity

of male authors was higher (0.60 articles per male author) than that of female authors

(0.34 articles per female author). Collectively, the overall productivity of males was also

higher than that of females as men accounted for 94 per cent and women accounted foronly 6 per cent of the articles published in 2003.

In the academic year 2002-2003 there were 40,054 faculty members in Irans higher

education[5] of which 6,598 (16.45 per cent) were female (Ghiasi, 2003, p. 133). Although

these figures do not cover graduate students and the private research sector, we can

rightly assume that they show the relative proportion of gender distribution in Irans

research as the research in Iran is mainly done in academic institutions. Therefore, one

would expect women to have about a 16.5 per cent share in the authorship of Iranian

articles. A chi-squared test (x2 7.94, df 1, p , 0.01) showed that the difference

between male and female productivity is significant at the 1 per cent level. Womens

contribution is much lower than expected.

However, one needs to take into account the context in which Iranian women maketheir contribution. Women accounted for slightly less than a sixth of the academics in

Iran at the time of the study, which means they were in a low minority and this could

have had an impact on their productivity. Moreover, the general productivity of

academic women seems to be lower than their male peers worldwide, even in the

developed counties with high GDI where issues such as gender discrimination are less

significant and women face fewer difficulties and barriers in their career compared to

those in a developing country.

Figure 3.International collaboration

of Iranian authors


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It has to be said that this study was limited just to one publication year and it isnecessary to conduct a research with a wider timeframe to obtain a clearer picture ofwomens contribution in scientific production. It must also be noted that the datapresented in the study were for 2003 and things might have changed during the last

few years. As the number of female students has increased during the last decade onewould expect some positive changes in the contribution of Iranian women in science.This needs to be investigated in a follow up study. The study also highlights the needfor further qualitative studies in order to investigate the reasons for the lowercontribution of women in scientific production compared to men. Comparing thefactors that underpin the productivity puzzle in an Islamic developing country withthose in developed countries might provide some greater insights.

Notes

1. For instance, the UK Resource Centre (UKRC) for women in Science, Engineering andTechnology (SET) was established in 2004 to deliver a substantial part of the BritishGovernments strategy for women in SET. For more information visit www.ukrc4setwomen.org.uk

2. GDI is an indication of the standard of living in a country, developed by the United Nations.It aims to show the inequalities between men and women in the following areas: long andhealthy life, knowledge, and a decent standard of living (Wikipedia, 2008).

3. The top five countries with the highest GDI are Iceland, Norway, Australia, Canada andIreland.

4. Fortunately, ISI has recently added this feature to its Web of Science. Although the search inISI is still based on the surnames and the initial letters of the forenames, a new field has beenadded to the full record which shows the full name of the authors in the case of the majorityof authors.

5. This figure excludes the educational staff and part-timers and only covers the state-runsection of higher education. The total figure for 2002-2003 (just for the state-run section) was67,775 of which 12,413 (18.31 per cent) were female.

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Corresponding authorHamid R. Jamali can be contacted at: [email protected]


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iranian women in science: a gender study of scientific productivity in an islamic country

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