Gender Bias in Energy Research: Insights from Central and Eastern Europe
December 2024
Matúš Mišík
Department of Political Science, Comenius University Bratislava, Slovakia
Gender bias in research has been well-documented across various areas of academic life, including academic publishing. Existing studies have examined gender-related biases in this area, but these studies typically relied on machine-assisted methods to predict authors’ gender. However, these automated approaches often vary in their accuracy. In our research, we took a different approach – one that was far more time-consuming but, we believe, more accurate: we manually coded the gender of all authors. Our findings confirm that male researchers are more likely to publish in ‘more prestigious’ journals than their female counterparts.
By ‘more prestigious’ journals, we refer to those with a higher impact factor. While we acknowledge that impact factor is not the only (or necessarily the best) way to measure journal quality, it remains a widely-used metric in many countries for evaluating academic output. The more papers an individual publishes in high-impact journals, the more productive they are considered by their institution or superior, which can have real-world implications, such as promotions, bonuses, grant opportunities, or government subsidies for public universities. Though impact factor isn’t the sole measure of journal quality, journals with high impact factors generally perform well on other metrics and are regarded as prestigious. For this reason, we chose impact factor as the operationalisation of a journal’s position in the academic hierarchy.
Previous studies have explored the relationship between gender and the prestige of journals where authors publish, often relying on machine-assisted gender assignment. These studies typically involve feeding a database of articles into a program that matches author names with gender based on pre-existing lists. While this method can assign gender with a certain precision, it has limitations. For instance, lists of names are never exhaustive, and the software struggles with names from certain regions, initials, or cultural variations (for example, names like ‘Andrea’ or ‘Ivica’, which can be gendered differently depending on the country).
To avoid these issues, we manually coded the gender of each author in our study – a highly time-consuming process that required us to limit our dataset to a manageable size. We chose to analyse articles on energy from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) published between 2004 and 2017, resulting in a total of 1,842 articles. We assigned gender to all authors in these articles, employing a highly detailed coding process.
”Male researchers are more likely to publish in ‘more prestigious’ journals than their female counterparts, a disparity that can limit opportunities for female researchers to advance their academic careers”
Our data collection process also differed from standard approaches. Instead of using a single database or focusing on specific journals, we manually created 30 sub-datasets, which we later merged into our main dataset. Eleven sub-datasets were based on searches in the Web of Science for country names (e.g., ‘Slovakia’) combined with the term ‘energy’. Another eleven sub-datasets were created using adjectives related to country names (e.g., ‘Lithuanian’). The remaining eight sub-datasets were based on terms used to describe the CEE region, such as ‘Central Europe’, ‘Visegrad Four’ or ‘Baltic States’.
Once we compiled our dataset, we coded not only the gender of authors but also several other variables, using statistical methods to analyse our results. Descriptive statistics revealed a higher proportion of male researchers in our dataset. Using linear regression analysis, we examined the relationship between authors’ gender and the impact factor of the journals in which they published. We approached this analysis from two perspectives: first, by examining the gender of the first author, and second, by considering the share of male authors across all authors in an article.
From the first perspective (gender of the first author), our results indicate a clear gender gap, with male authors publishing in journals with higher impact factors than their female counterparts. We found that articles using qualitative methodologies were typically published in journals with lower impact factors than those based on quantitative methodologies. However, the interaction effect between methodology and gender was not statistically significant.
In the second part of our analysis, we defined the gender variable as the proportion of male authors within an article. Here, we found consistent results: articles with a higher proportion of male authors tended to be published in journals with higher impact factors. This analysis further confirmed the existence of a gender gap when considering all authors of an article, not just the first author.
These findings have important policy implications. Our results suggest that male-dominated research teams are more likely to publish in ‘more prestigious’ journals, potentially limiting opportunities for female researchers to advance their academic careers. Additionally, the number of co-authors on an article has been shown to influence its citation rate, and existing literature presents evidence that articles with a male first author and female last author attract more citations. Our research further indicates that energy research in the CEE region is not confined to a few journals, but spans across hundreds of publications. Specifically, we identified 416 journals where our 1,842 articles were published, which highlights the importance of considering a broader range of journals when conducting a literature review.
That said, our study has several limitations. First, we restricted our analysis to a narrow time and geographical scope to make manual coding feasible. However, we believe our methodology provides sufficient detail for the results to be generalized. We also used two independent coders to address potential biases in the gender assignment process. A second limitation relates to our use of impact factor as the sole measure of journal prestige. Finally, our study adopts a binary view of gender, following existing research in this area. However, we recognize that gender is a more complex phenomenon than this binary approach suggests. Nevertheless, gender bias remains a persistent problem across all levels of society, making progress in raising awareness and promoting equality all the more important.
This article was originally published in Energy Strategy Reviews
This work was supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency Grant no. APVV-20-0012 and APVV-23-0032. The authors would like to thank Samuel Spáč for his advice and comments on drafts of this paper as well as Carolyn Benson and Catriona Menzies for help with language editing.