News from this newspaper (China Youth Daily, China Youth Daily reporter Wang Yejie) A few days ago, at the 5th World Top Scientists Forum "She" Forum, the Scientific Research Evaluation Laboratory jointly established by the Documentation and Information Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Elsevier, Jointly released my country's first research report on the interpretation of China's scientific research ecology from a gender perspective - "Portraits of Chinese Researchers from a Gender Perspective" (hereinafter referred to as the "Report").
The report analyzes the scientific research output of more than 160,000 Chinese researchers from 2005 to 2019 from the perspective of gender, combined with the paper data in Elsevier's Scopus database, from academic impact, field characteristics, scientific research roles, scientific research cooperation, and scientific funds. The current situation of Chinese female scientists is analyzed from multiple dimensions such as application.
The analysis results show that the gender gap in China's scientific research field has gradually improved, and female researchers have made progress in terms of scientific research participation and academic influence; in various disciplines, the gender gap of Chinese researchers is gradually weakening, especially in life sciences It is the closest to the male-to-female ratio in the medical field.
The report suggests that in the future female researchers should play more leading roles in scientific research and give full play to their creativity and influence on the scientific research stage.
"Currently, more and more female scientific and technological workers are demonstrating extraordinary creativity and influence on the global technology stage. However, the gender imbalance in the world's scientific research field still exists for a long time, and China is also facing a similar situation. Researcher Liu Xiwen, director of the Document Information Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and director of the Joint Laboratory, said that the report revealed the development of the gender dimension of Chinese researchers in the form of data analysis for the first time, filling the gap in the research on career portraits of Chinese scientific research groups.
The report shows that at this stage, the scale of male researchers far exceeds that of women, but the proportion of women is increasing rapidly year by year.
In terms of changes in the proportion of male and female researchers, the proportion of female researchers in China increased from 13% in 2005 to 27.7% in 2019, an increase of 14.7 percentage points.
On the issue of the "workplace ceiling" for female researchers, the situation is also improving, and the difference between women and men in the promotion of professional titles is gradually narrowing.
From 2008 to 2017, the ratio of men to women with senior professional titles dropped from 5.47 to 3.92, and the ratio of intermediate titles dropped from 1.94 to 1.57.
This shows that the disadvantaged position of Chinese female researchers in rank promotion is gradually improving, and the competitiveness of the workplace is continuously strengthened.
According to the report, more and more Chinese female researchers are actively engaged in research in various disciplines, and the gender differences in the selection of different research fields are gradually weakening.
Compared with 2005 to 2009, the proportion of males and females in all disciplines has decreased significantly from 2015 to 2019, and the ratios of males and females are the closest in the fields of life sciences and medicine.
In terms of academic influence, gender differences were not significant.
Taking the academic output from 2015 to 2019 as an example, the impact index score of male papers was 1.22, while that of women was 1.13 in the same period.
Specific to different disciplines, women's performance in life sciences and medicine is better than other fields, especially in neuroscience and pharmacology; while in physical sciences, computer science, engineering technology and other fields, women's academic influence is still lower than men.
The report shows that female researchers generally have more collaborators than males, and the size of female-led scientific research teams is also larger than that of males.
Male researchers are more active in international collaborations.
"Through the report, we can see that Chinese female researchers have experienced huge and rapid growth in terms of number, scientific research output, academic influence and implementation of scientific research projects. At the same time, we also deeply realize that they are facing Yu Licheng, Secretary-General of the Shanghai Center of the World Association of Top Scientists, said, “As the world’s premiere platform for the report, we not only hope to share these insights with you, but also advocate the construction of an inclusive and diverse innovation ecosystem that strengthens The gender balance and diversity of the scientific research team encourages more female researchers to play a greater role in scientific research, technology development, science communication and application."
Source: China Youth Daily