ARTÍCULO DE INVESTIGACIÓN
Researching women and men 1996–2020:
Is androcentrism still dominant?
Mike Thelwall1
, Abrizah Abdullah2
, and Ruth Fairclough1
1University of Wolverhampton, Reino Unido
2University of Malaya, Malasia
Palabras clave: investigación académica, androcentrism, feminism, gender equity, research publishing,
sexism
ABSTRACTO
This article assesses the balance of research concerning women and men over the past quarter
century using the crude heuristic of counting Scopus-indexed journal articles relating to women
or men, as suggested by their titles or abstracts. A manual checking procedure together with a
word-based heuristic was used to identify whether an article related to women or men. El
heuristic includes explicit mentions of women and men, implicit mentions, and a set of gender-
focused health issues and medical terminology. Based on the results, more published articles
now relate to women than to men. Además, more than twice as many articles relate exclusively
to women than exclusively to men, with the ratio increasing from 2.16 a 1 en 1996
a 2.25 a 1 en 2020. Monogender articles mostly addressed primarily female health issues
(maternity, breast cancer, cervical cancer) with fewer about primarily male health issues
(testicular cancer, pancreatic cancer, health needs of men who have sex with men). Alguno
articles also explicitly addressed gender inequality, such as empowering female entrepreneurs.
The findings suggest that the androcentrism of early science has eroded in terms of research
temas. This apparent progress should be encouraging for women researchers and society.
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1.
INTRODUCCIÓN
The modern scientific method was born in sexism during the 17th century, created by men partly
with the belief that a masculine approach was necessary for the mastery of nature (Keller, 1995).
Women were rendered invisible (Keller, 1982) with a focus on of the importance of “great men”
(p.ej., Auchmuty & Rackley, 2020; Colina, 2019), despite a few prominent early female scientists
(Blum, 2005), and women were considered intellectually inferior in society (Laqueur, 1990).
Although the research itself was seen as objective, it embedded male biases (androcentrism)
in the choice of research topics and the seriousness with which different issues were treated. Este
was perhaps clearest in the field of medicine. Por ejemplo, a century ago a woman could be
diagnosed with hysteria for failing to conform to the social role that men expected her to play,
with her uterus sometimes being blamed (Bueter, 2017; Edwards, 2009; see also Kadar, 2019).
Similarmente, cancer was originally regarded as a primarily female disease that was sometimes attrib-
uted to promiscuity (Löwy, 2013). The androcentrism of science was widely, forcefully, y
(partly) successfully challenged during the second wave of feminism (Whelehan, 1995), especialmente-
cially in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The extent to which androcentrism has been driven out
of science is unclear, sin embargo, especially in research topic choices.
un acceso abierto
diario
Citación: Thelwall, METRO., Abdullah, A., &
Fairclough, R. (2022). Researching
women and men 1996–2020: Es
androcentrism still dominant?
Estudios de ciencias cuantitativas, 3(1),
244–264. https://doi.org/10.1162
/qss_a_00173
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00173
Revisión por pares:
https://publons.com/publon/10.1162
/qss_a_00173
Supporting Information:
https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00173
Recibió: 3 Julio 2021
Aceptado: 18 Noviembre 2021
Autor correspondiente:
Mike Thelwall
m.thelwall@wlv.ac.uk
Editor de manejo:
Juego Waltman
Derechos de autor: © 2022 Mike Thelwall,
Abrizah Abdullah, and Ruth Fairclough.
Publicado bajo Creative Commons
Atribución 4.0 Internacional (CC POR 4.0)
licencia.
La prensa del MIT
Researching women and men 1996–2020
1.1. Feminist Critiques of Androcentrism in Science
Androcentrism is a key feminist concept (Whelehan & Pilcher, 2004), with androcentrism in
science being called out in print from a feminist perspective by 1970 (Heide, 1970). The exten-
sive feminist critiques of science during the second wave of feminism merged feminist thinking
and science studies social constructivist critiques of the monolithic objectivity claims of sci-
ence (p.ej., Kuhn, 1962). This tackled the invisibility of women in science (Bleier, 1988) y
variously addressed at least five different types of androcentrism (Harding, 1986; Keller, 1982;
see also Grady, 1981): the unfair low proportion of female scientists; the choice of science
topics being male dominated, including problem definitions; methods and interpretations
in some areas of science being restricted by sexism or male perspectives, particularly in biol-
ogy and the social sciences; science being harnessed to justify sexist social projects; and mod-
ern science having (partly consciously) developed a fundamentally masculine core that
skewed how scientists worked. Feminist studies documented how androcentrism was present
in science and society and how it was learned (p.ej., Kelly, 1985).
Because of the many and deep problems found in science, there were disagreements within
feminism about whether science itself should be discarded or reformed, y cómo. Para
ejemplo, there was not a consensus about whether scientific objectivity was tainted by the
masculine ethos of science or whether (masculine) scientific objectivity itself was irredeem-
capaz (Harding, 1986) or replaceable (Haraway, 1988). The problems identified were often con-
nected to ways in which science affects other oppressed groups differently or more (Crenshaw,
1989; Harding, 2008; Schiebinger, 2004), mirroring many other feminist arguments (davis,
2008). They also occurred in parallel with ongoing sexism in society (Schwartz, McDermott,
& Martino-Harms, 2016), including in education (p.ej., Lawson, 2020).
Strong evidence has been found for all five types of androcentrism mentioned above and,
since the second wave of feminism, there has been mixed evidence of progress. Primero, allá
have been large but uneven increases in the proportion of female scientists in many countries
(Keller, 2004; UNESCO, 2021), supported by reducing gender inequalities in education (Fox,
2001) and initiatives to support women in science (barr & Birke, 1998), but with continued
obstacles to women (kim & Moser, 2021). There has also been increasing recognition of
female scientists (Schiebinger, 1999, 2000), but falling far short of parity (Meho, 2021).
Segundo, a general shift in scholarly research topics to include women seems likely because
of the changing nature of academia, not only with reducing gender imbalances in researchers
but also with the professionalization and adoption by universities of people-focused social and
health services (Blättel-Mink & Kuhlmann, 2003; Hunt, Adamson et al., 1998). Most people-
based topics have an above-average proportion of female researchers (p.ej., Thelwall, Bailey
et al., 2019), suggesting that their increasing availability (p.ej., Ciencias Sociales, health sciences)
also reflects the changing gendered nature of academia. There is evidence of substantial prog-
ress in the health sciences (Harding, 1998; Moscucci, 2016; Rolin, 2004; Schiebinger, 1999,
2000), although dangerous sexist medical decision-making seems to have continued into the
21st century (p.ej., Krieger, Löwy et al., 2005). Además, there are now also female-oriented
specialties, such as women’s studies (Berger & Radeloff, 2014). There is no systematic evi-
dence of gendered topic shifts in academia, sin embargo.
Tercero, there are now many examples of research progress due to bypassing masculine inter-
pretations (Keller, 2004; Schiebinger, 1999, 2000), with guides and guidelines to avoid sexist
suposiciones (Stark-Adamec & Kimball, 1984) y, fourth, there seems to be much less use of
science to justify sexist social practices (p.ej., examples cited by Walby [2001]) and more use
of science to argue for gender equality (p.ej., 11,782 documents in Scopus mentioned “gender
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Researching women and men 1996–2020
equality” in their title, abstract, or keywords in November 2021, with the first being from 1982:
Patterson [1982]). Quinto, there is no evidence about changes in the difficult-to-quantify mascu-
line core of science, with persisting perceptions of science as not feminine (Banchefsky,
Westfall et al., 2016), but declining sexist language use in science (Hegarty & Buechel, 2006).
The causes of the partial successes so far are impossible to determine, but they may be
primarily the outcome of the societal changes triggered by the political demands of second
wave feminism and pressure from women’s groups. Por ejemplo, grassroots activism such
as the Women’s Health Movement in the United States from the 1960s seems likely to have
impacted health-related research (Nichols, 2000). Feminist critiques of science, although influ-
ential, may not have gained the science-wide audience necessary to be the likely cause of the
main changes (Keller, 1995, 2004).
1.2. The Need for Female-Focused Research
There are many reasons why there is an ongoing need for research relating to women in a
range of different contexts. The most obvious topics calling for female-specific research are
arguably pregnancy and childbirth. This is not only for the health of the pregnant woman
but also for the health of the baby. Además, all medicines need separate safety checks
for pregnant women to ensure that they do not have side effects for the birth process (Pequeño
& Wickremsinhe, 2017). Other female-specific or clearly gender-differentiated medical topics
include reproductive health (Boyce & Neiterman, 2021), breast cancer, and cervical cancer.
Research on women is also needed for health-related topics that have important gender-
specific dimensions, including coronary heart disease (Bueter, 2017), drug and alcohol depen-
dency (Meyer, Isaacs et al., 2019), domestic violence (Leung, Miedema et al., 2019), y
sexual behavior (Kowalewska, Gola et al., 2020). More generally, gender medicine, en el
sense of investigating gender differences in the physical and social effects of treatment, es
now recognized as important (Baggio, Corsini et al., 2013).
In addition to health issues, there is a need for more women-focused research about
employment to better encapsulate the type of work that women disproportionately do and
the additional legal, social, and other challenges that they face (Flores, Settles et al., 2021;
Traylor, Ng et al., 2020). Many papers have investigated why women are underrepresented
in some jobs, including in science, tecnología, engineering, y matemáticas (STEM)
(Poggesi, Mari et al., 2020), policing (Chu, 2018), computing (Trauth, 2020), public relations
(Place & Vardeman-Winter, 2018), and as entrepreneurs (Banihani, 2020; Dar, li, & Chaudhuri,
2020). Women in senior roles in various professions have also been investigated, exploring why
they are underrepresented or why there is a glass ceiling (Jalalzai, 2018; Leitch, Welter, & Henry,
2018; Moyo & Perumal, 2020). These studies all suggest that there is a greater need for research
relating to women in many work contexts, if equality of opportunity is accepted as a societal
bien.
More generally, research may need to focus on women in a given role if their experience is
substantially different from that of men. The many examples of this include farming in devel-
oping nations (Ball, 2020), friendship (Kan, 2020; Martinussen, Wetherell, & Braun, 2020),
and imprisonment (Covington, 1998).
1.3. Research Questions
As the above brief and limited summary suggests, although women have been historically dis-
missed in academia, there are many reasons why research focused on women is essential.
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Researching women and men 1996–2020
Además, while androcentrism in research topic choice seems likely to have diminished since
the most influential feminist critiques of science were published, it is not clear whether it is still
diminishing or substantial. Although many scholars have made clear cases for the need for
more research relating to women in specific contexts, this article takes a broad approach, sur-
veying all academic fields (primarily) over the last quarter century for evidence of the gender
balance of academic research in terms of the proportion relating to men or women. The fol-
lowing questions drive this study.
(cid:129) How have the proportions of published academic research ( journal articles only) relat-
ing to men and women changed over time?
(cid:129) How have the proportions of published academic research ( journal articles only) exclu-
sively relating to men and exclusively relating to women changed over time?
(cid:129) What is the current (2020) gender balance between men and women as topics of aca-
demic research?
2. MÉTODOS
The research design was to construct a heuristic to identify journal articles relating to men,
women, or people, and then compare their prevalence over the past quarter century. People
are included for context in the initial set of terms. For this article, men and women are people
described as such in research articles, whether this refers to their biological sex or socially
constructed gender, ignoring the difference between the two as a practical necessity. Cuando
age ranges are reported for men or women, they must include 18 and older (es decir., adultos).
Although there is a difference between the biological sex and socially constructed gender,
the two align for most people. Por ejemplo, solo 0.6% of adults identify as transgender in
the United States (Flores, Herman et al., 2018), so differentiating between cisgender and trans-
gender from article abstracts, even if possible, would not change the results. In the accuracy
checks (see below) there was one case mentioning a transgender person and of course they
were included with their identified gender.
As strong evidence of trends in research before 1996 could not be identified for the reasons
given below, a simple title word counting heuristic was used to give an initial estimate of the
proportion of research related to women, hombres, nonbinary people, and all people as an initial
broad check. The remaining subsections relate to the primary data sets and tests.
Nonbinary people (Fausto-Sterling, 2012) were not examined in the rest of this article
because there is too little reported information about them to support a comparable analysis,
and the first nonbinary research in Scopus seems to be halfway through the period examined
(Corwin, 2009). Por 2020, there were about 213 journal articles about nonbinary people in
Scopus (as estimated by the query: SRCTYPE( j) AND DOCTYPE(ar) AND TITLE-ABS(género
Y (nonbinary OR “non-binary” OR “non binary”)) cual es 2% del 10,343 for women
(as estimated by the query: SRCTYPE( j) AND DOCTYPE(ar) AND TITLE-ABS(gender AND
woman)).
2.1. Scopus Journal Articles 1996–2020 with 500+ Character Abstracts
The analysis was conducted on Scopus journal articles (documents of Scopus type “article” in
publications of type “journal”) de 1996 a 2020. The year 1996 was chosen as the starting
punto, como 1996 was a recognized journal coverage threshold for Scopus, although an initiative
has been conducted by Elsevier to address this (Beatty, 2015). De este modo, earlier years could have
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Researching women and men 1996–2020
substantially different journal compositions, making any trends difficult to interpret. All articles
between these years were downloaded from Scopus (Supplement A: Table S5).
Some articles have no abstract in Scopus, with the proportion decreasing substantially
entre 1996 y 2020 (Supplement A: Table S5), which would affect the method used here.
Articles were therefore required to have a nontrivial abstract to be included (this article was
initially prepared without this step and the results were substantially different and misleading).
After exploring the data, a minimum length of 500 characters was chosen as a round number
that seemed to be sufficient to exclude trivial abstracts, such as those that were only copyright
statements. Webometric Analyst (https://lexiurl.wlv.ac.uk) was used to extract articles with
abstracts having at least 500 characters for the main analysis. Keywords were not analyzed
because they can contain generic terms added by indexers, including outdated sexist terms,
which would skew the results.
2.2. Articles Mentioning Combinations of Men, Women, and People
A program was written to identify articles directly mentioning women, hombres, or people in their
titles or abstracts, as a first step to identify articles relating to women or men. These terms are
justified below. The program identified the words “women,” “woman,” “men,” “man,” “peo-
por ejemplo,” and “person,” counting and listing the articles matching one of the following six condi-
ciones. These conditions generate the main sets investigated and their opposites (see the next
subsection for the purpose of the opposites). The people-related set is included to give context
to the main results.
1. Mentions “women” or “woman”
2. Mentions “men” or “man”
3. Mentions “people” or “person”
4. Does not mention “women” or “woman” (opposite of 1)
5. Does not mention “men” or “man” (opposite of 2)
6. Does not mention “people” or “person” (opposite of 3)
The following sets were also generated to investigate exclusive mentions of women or men.
People were not investigated for this set due to the difficulty in operationalizing research
exclusively mentioning people.
7. Mentions (“women” or “woman”) but does not mention (“men” or “man”)
8. Mentions (“men” or “man”) but does not mention (“women” or “woman”)
9. Does not mention (“women” or “woman”) or mentions (“men” or “man”) (the opposite
de 7)
10. Does not mention (“men” or “man”) or mentions (“women” or “woman”) (opposite
de 8)
The terms above were identified at the word level, so “men” would not match “women”
and “woman” would not match “womanly,” for example.
2.3. Articles Relating to Women or Men: Random Sample Generation
An article can mention one of the six keywords searched for due to a typographic error (p.ej.,
“man” instead of “mean”) or a different meaning of the word (p.ej., “man” meaning “human,"
as in, “You can’t ever reach a man if you don’t speak his language.”) It is therefore useful to
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Researching women and men 1996–2020
assess the extent to which these words are used in the context of men or women being subjects
of the article concerned, at least as described by the title or abstract. De este modo, checks were per-
formed on the main sets analyzed (1, 2, 7, 8: hombres, women, exclusively men, exclusively
women) to assess whether the articles related to the relevant group in addition to mentioning
a ellos. The concept of “related to” is clarified below.
It is also possible for an article to relate to men, women, or people without mentioning
a ellos. Por ejemplo, women might be described as ladies or referred to by name. A study might
also address issues of primary concern to one gender without explicitly mentioning them. A
illustrate this, it seems reasonable to argue that an analysis of prostate cancer cells would relate
to men but not women in this sense. De este modo, for each of the main sets, articles not mentioning
the terms were examined to assess whether they nevertheless related to women or men (4, 5,
9, 10: no men, no women, not exclusively men, not exclusively women).
As there are too many articles to investigate individually, random samples were taken of
each set from the first and last years (1996 y 2020) to assess the proportion that were about
the relevant group. A preliminary analysis suggested that samples of 10,000 articles would be
needed to guarantee confidence intervals of width less than 1% for the opposite sets, y eso
samples of 1,000 would be large enough to identify trends within the main sets. These sample
sizes were generated with a random number generator in Webometric Analyst (Texto|Copy
files|Randomly select n lines).
2.4. Articles Relating to Women or Men: Automatic Annotation of Random Samples
The eight random samples (88,000 article titles and abstracts, half for 1996 and half for 2020)
were loaded into spreadsheets (a separate spreadsheet for each group and year) and sorted into
random orders (using Excel’s random number generator) for manual classification. The first
1,000 records from each set were initially read to identify characteristics that would allow
judgments about whether they related to women or men (aged 18+). This was used to generate
a set of rules to identify terms in titles and abstracts that would help with decision-making, en
addition to the main keywords themselves (p.ej., woman, hombres). Excel commands were then
used to extract snippets of text containing these terms into a separate column, to help identify
the main contexts. Aquí hay unos ejemplos.
(cid:129) The terms “female” and “male” were indicative of women and men, respectivamente, entonces
extracting phrases containing these would help make a judgment about whether an arti-
cle related to women or men, respectivamente. Por ejemplo, one of the snippets extracted
from an abstract was, “in a 27-year-old female patient, with long-term,” indicating that
the article related to women.
(cid:129) Mentions of men or males often pointed to the implicit inclusion of women, such as in
phrases such as “110 patients, 57 of which were men.”
(cid:129) Mentions of gender-specific conditions were accepted as being about the relevant gen-
der, so phrases including identified gender-related terms (p.ej., “breast [cancer]", y
“prostate”) were singled out.
(cid:129) Mentions of animals suggested that articles were not about humans, despite the inclu-
sion of “male” or “female,” so words such as “porcine,” “bovine,” “rats,” and “mice”
were extracted to help identify articles relating to animal genders.
The terms (including term stems) identified in this stage were initially as follows: sheep,
guinea, drosophila, rats, locust, mice, mouse, bovine, porcine, niños, pediatric, paediatric,
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Researching women and men 1996–2020
adolescent, chemotherapy, women, hombres, madre, father, matern, género, masculino, femenino, preg-
nan, breast, menopaus, abortion, prostate, and testicular. The italic terms are exclusion words,
to flag that a gendered word might be animal related (also flagging that “mother” is in “che-
motherapy”). This initial list of relevant terms was subsequently expanded for greater accuracy
by adding a large set of systematically identified extra terms, as described in the next
subsection.
2.5. Words Indicating That an Article Is Likely to Relate to Women or Men
This subsection describes the process used to systematically identify large sets of terms rele-
vant to research about men and women from the data to help the manual coding process iden-
tify articles relating to women and men even if they were not explicitly mentioned. There does
not seem to be a list of the main topics of research that relate to women or men, so lists of
words associated with women and men were constructed from the 1996 y 2020 muestras
using the word association detection procedure previously used to identify gendered topics
(Thelwall et al., 2019) using the free software Mozdeh (mozdeh.wlv.ac.uk). A complete expla-
nation of the procedure is available elsewhere (Thelwall, 2021) and this section summarizes
the method without the statistical justifications.
Primero, the articles from 1996 were split into three sets: those including the word “women,"
those including the word “men,” and the rest. The terms “man” and “woman” were not used
because “man” had many false matches for meanings related to “humans,” contaminating the
resultados. A chi-squared test with familywise error correction (Benjamini & Hochberg, 1995) era
then used to identify words that were statistically significantly more common in one of the two
conjuntos ( pag = 0.001). This was repeated for 2020, after taking a random sample of the 2020 artículos
of the same size as 1996 (to avoid making the 2020 analysis statistically more powerful). El
corresponding gender sets from the 2 years were then combined to give an overall women-
associated words list and an overall men-associated words list.
The lists of terms statistically significantly associated with women were then split into three
sets based on an examination of their use within article titles and abstracts: probably indicates
femenino, possibly indicates female, and does not indicate female. The same split was made for
the set of words for men (Supplement A: Table S6). The three-way split was useful because the
terms had varying associations with gender and varying degrees of usefulness. Por ejemplo,
childbirth was probably female, breast was possibly female (the phrase “breast height” was
used for both genders), and delivering was not useful for indicating female. The term delivering
was strongly associated with women for its use related to childbirth, but was also used in many
other contexts and, when used for women, seemed to be accompanied by other terms in the
lista, so was redundant. Many of the male-associated terms were for diseases that disproportion-
ately impact men, such as coronary heart disease and smoking, but these are also major prob-
lems for women so could not be classed as male diseases. Other male-associated terms that
were common and not indicative of gender, such as adult, sexo, and left, were also excluded.
For these reasons, more of the male-associated terms were ignored.
In a few cases of clear imbalance, terms were added to the lists even though not present
in the original results: él, him, su, and lesbian. In many cases, the meaning of the words
had to be looked up online (p.ej., oocyte is an immature egg cell, hence indicating a female,
but Xenopus is a frog species, so a Xenopus oocyte wouldn’t be related to women). In two
casos, words were common but in one context strongly gendered, so were replaced by
phrases: section replaced by “C section,” and vitro replaced by “vitro fertilisation” and “vitro
fertilization.”
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The hormone-related terms in the “probably” lists were not useful in practice, despite strong
gender associations. They seemed to be rarely used by the dominant gender (p.ej., testosterone
for men) without mentioning gender and therefore did not identify many new gender classifi-
cations, but were sometimes used for the other gender investigated (p.ej., “Pelvic ultrasound
and hormonal studies were performed in 29 adolescent patients, aged 12 a 20 años, to eval-
uate menstrual irregularities. […] Serum levels of LH, LH:FSH ratio, testosterone, and andro-
stenedione were significantly higher ( pag < .05) in group III”). Many of the other terms in this list
were “probably” for some meanings of the words but not for others (e.g., msm = “men who
have sex with men” implies men, but msm = “mainstream media” doesn’t). Almost all the
probable terms could also be used for nonhumans (in contrast to woman, women, men,
man), so there is no “Definitely” category and they could not be added to the list used to sep-
arate the initial sets in Scopus (“women,” “men,” “woman,” “man”).
2.6. Articles Relating to Women or Men: Manual Analysis of Random Samples
Extracts based on the terms in Supplement A, Table S6 were added to the classification spread-
sheets, which were then manually classified by the first author. Because this procedure relies
on words derived from a word association analysis, the concepts of “relating to women” and
“relating to men” were therefore effectively operationalized as follows.
(cid:129) An article relates to women (female humans aged 18+) if it mentions woman, women,
male(s), female(s), another gendered term (e.g., mother) or any of the probably or pos-
sibly terms (for men or women) in Supplement A Table S6 and the subject of the study
includes women. The article author and other researchers do not count, unless the
researcher’s name is in the article title (e.g., “Magi Sque’s contribution to nursing prac-
tice”). This includes implicit mentions, such as “30% of subjects were men” or “smoking
is more common amongst men.” A human fetus was not equated with the woman
whose body it formed part of, but the placenta was. These were judgment decisions that
could reasonably have been made differently.
(cid:129) An article relates to men (male humans aged 18+) if it mentions man, men, male(s),
female(s), another gendered term (e.g., uncle), or any of the probably or possibly terms
(for men or women) in Supplement A Table S6 and the subject of the study includes
men. The author and other researchers do not count, unless the researcher’s name is
in the article title (e.g., “Tribute to Bob”). This includes implicit mentions, such as “12
of the adults were female” or “the treatment is more effective for women.”
Mentions of humans, adults or “gender” were not regarded as relating to women or men
because the focus is on research that relates directly to each gender. Mentions of almost exclu-
sively male or female conditions (e.g., breast cancer) or human body parts (e.g., testicles) were
regarded as mentioning the relevant gender. During the classification, terms were looked up
online if their context was unclear. For example, the phrase, “The SMAD3 (mothers against
decapentaplegic homolog 3) phosphorylation (pSMAD3) was significantly enhanced, and
pSMAD3 staining was colocalized with αSMA in vein walls,” was judged unrelated to women
because Wikipedia revealed SMAD3 to be an ironically named protein unrelated to mothers.
The first author’s classification of the four main (1, 2, 7, 8: men, women, exclusively men,
exclusively women) and four opposite (4, 5, 9, 10: no men, no women, not exclusively men,
not exclusively women) sets of articles were cross-checked by the second author blind coding
a random sample of 100 articles from each of them and each year (i.e., 1,600 articles in total).
The second author was also not told the overall results of the first coding in advance, in
Quantitative Science Studies
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addition to not knowing the codes for individual articles. For each set, a random sample of 100
articles was selected using Excel’s random number generator. Separate sets of 100 were
selected for 1996 and 2020 in case the results varied over time. For the greatest testing power,
the sets were balanced if possible (50% for each code based on the first author’s results);
otherwise the sets were made as balanced as possible. Cohen’s kappa (Cohen, 1960) intercoder
consistency scores for each of these sets were substantial or higher in all cases, at least 0.74,
validating the first author’s results. The one exception, for which no kappa could be calculated,
had 100% agreement (Table 1).
2.7. Statistical Corrections
The results from the first author’s coding (percentage of false matches for 1996 and 2020 for
each class: Table 2) were used to correct the results from Section 2.2 from statistics about the
number of articles mentioning each target group (e.g., women) to the number of articles relat-
ing to that target group, irrespective of whether they were actually mentioned. For women in
2020, the corrected figure was the number of articles mentioning “woman” or “women”
(83,720) times the proportion of correct matches from group 1 (0.998), added to the number
of articles not mentioning “woman” or “woman” in 2020 (2,343,045) times the proportion of
false matches from group 4. This is then an estimate of the total number of articles relating to
women in Scopus:
83; 720 (cid:1) 0:998 þ 2; 343; 045 (cid:1) 0:0535 ¼ 208; 905 articles relating to women in 2020
The other results were calculated similarly. This method works for the 2 years with manu-
ally classified random samples (1996 and 2020), and the percentages of correct and false
matches for other years were estimated by linearly interpolating the proportions correct or false
from these 2 years.
2.8. Content Analysis
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A content analysis (Neuendorf, 2015) was applied to 500 (1%) articles mentioning women but
not men and 500 (2%) articles mentioning men but not women to identify some common
gendered topics for background to the main results. A sample size of 500 was chosen to
Table 1. Cohen’s kappa agreement rates on balanced (when possible) random samples of 100
articles from 1996 and 2020 with eight different relationships to men and women (full results
online: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.16680535)
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Men
No men
Women but no men
Men or no women
Men but no women
Women or no men
1996
[100%]
0.92
0.84
0.86
0.76
0.78
0.80
0.88
2020
0.80
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0.88
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0.74
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Quantitative Science Studies
Researching women and men 1996–2020
Table 2.
10,000) from the manual classification of 16 random samples
Proportion of correct matches (main sets of 1,000) and false matches (opposite sets of
Set
Women
No women
Men
No men
Women but no men
Men or no women
Men but no women
Women or no men
Sample size
1,000
10,000
1,000
10,000
1,000
10,000
1,000
10,000
1996
1.000
0.0428
0.868
0.0326
0.920
0.0227
0.667
0.0111
2020
0.998
0.0535
0.950
0.044
0.870
0.0207
0.653
0.0124
identify the main themes, although it would not reveal rare topics. The 500 articles in each
case were chosen at random from 2020 to give up-to-date information. The content analysis
was applied inductively. The text was read first and then categories were added when a com-
mon factor was noticed in the titles and abstracts that would allow multiple related articles to
be grouped together. Different schemes were used for the two sets of articles because the arti-
cle types tended to be different, and a combined set of categories would be unhelpful. This
analysis was conducted for an earlier version of the paper, before the short or missing abstract
problem was discovered and so includes a small number with short or no abstracts (2.4% and
2.8% of the two sets). The codebooks used are in Supplement B.
The first and second authors independently coded the results with the same scheme to test
for the accuracy of the coding. A Cohen’s kappa intercoder consistency check was used
(Cohen, 1960), giving a score of 0.782 for women and 0.835 for men. These scores are high
enough to validate the results. For example, according to one popular set of guidelines, they
could be characterized as “substantial agreement” and “almost perfect agreement,” respec-
tively (Landis & Koch, 1977).
3. RESULTS
Using the simplistic heuristic of counting words in Scopus-indexed journal article titles without
correcting for false matches or changes in the journal coverage of Scopus, published academic
research seems to have switched from focusing on men to focusing on women in 1986
(Figure 1), but this conclusion is likely to be untrue for multiple reasons. The data includes
irrelevant matches (e.g., “man” meaning chess piece or operate), sexist language (e.g., men
meaning people), research about these groups using other terminology or mentioning them
outside titles, and substantial changes in the journals indexed by Scopus. Nevertheless, this
graph provides at least weak support for the contention that science has changed from its early
focus on men’s interests.
The remaining results relate only to Scopus-indexed journal articles with abstracts contain-
ing at least 500 characters, published 1996–2020. To avoid repetition, the phrase, “mentioning
women” will be used to refer the occurrence of either “women” or “woman” (or possessives)
in an article title and abstracts, and similarly for “mentioning men.” The phrases “relating to
women” and “relating to men” will be used as defined in Section 2.6.
Quantitative Science Studies
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Figure 1. The percentage of Scopus-indexed journal articles mentioning selected gender-related terms in their titles. All queries started with
SRCTYPE( j) AND DOCTYPE(ar) AND to specify journal articles.
3.1. Research About or Mentioning Men or Women in Titles or Abstracts
The terms “women” or “woman” increased in use from 1996 to 2003, then decreased to 2018,
before increasing again, giving an overall small increase (Figure 2). These terms are more com-
monly used in article titles and abstracts than are the terms “men” or “man,” which overall
decreased in use over the same quarter century. As a result of this, the ratio of the female to
the male terms increased unevenly from 1.37 to 1 to 1.76 to 1 over this quarter century. In
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Figure 2. Trends in the use of “men” or “man,” “women” or “women,” “people” or “person” in
article titles and abstracts (uncorrected).
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contrast, the terms “people” or “person” have substantially increased in use. The increases in
2020 may be due to an increase in men, women, and people research in response to the
COVID-19 pandemic.
After accuracy checks on random samples of 1,000 or 10,000 articles from 1996 and 2020
and interpolating accuracy linearly between the 2 years, the percentage of articles relating to
men or women was estimated within articles mentioning or not mentioning men or women
(Figure 3). Overall, more articles relate to women than mention women in titles or abstracts
and similarly for men. For articles mentioning women, there are statistically significant differ-
ences between years (nonoverlapping confidence intervals), but not an overall simple trend.
Annual changes may be due to the inclusion or exclusion of individual people-related journals
in Scopus. The same is true for men. There is also a statistically significantly higher percentage
of articles relating to women but not mentioning them in 2020 compared to 1996 (the line is
almost straight because it is primarily based on accuracy interpolation between 1996 and
2020). The same is true for men. The “men” or “man” line does not decrease as much in
Figure 2 due to a decrease in false matches. This was partly caused by a reduction in the
use of sexist language (e.g., “men” for “people”).
The Figure 3 lines for each gender were added to estimate the overall proportion of Scopus-
indexed articles relating to women and to men. This gives the main result for this subsection
and addresses the first research question. There were statistically significant increases in both
cases, with the gap widening slightly (Figure 4). The ratio of the female to the male terms
decreased slightly from 1.41 to 1 to 1.39 to 1 over this quarter century, however.
3.2. Research Exclusively About or Mentioning Men or Women in Titles or Abstracts
Considering exclusive uses only (i.e., women but not men, men but not women), the terms
“women” or “woman” were used about twice as often in article titles and abstracts than were
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Figure 3. Trends in the use of the terms “men” or “man” and “women” or “women” relating to
these groups in article titles and abstracts, based on accuracy checks in 1996 and 2000, linearly
interpolated, plus opposites.
Quantitative Science Studies
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Figure 4. Trends in article title and abstracts relating to men or women, based on accuracy checks
in 1996 and 2000, linearly interpolated.
the terms “men” or “man” from 1996 to 2020, with the gap widening (Figure 5). The ratio of
the female to the male terms increased from 1.65 to 1 to 2.41 to 1 over this period.
After accuracy checks on random samples of 1,000 or 10,000 articles from 1996 and 2020
and interpolating linearly between the two, the percentage of articles relating to men or
women was estimated within articles exclusively mentioning or not mentioning men or
women (Figure 5). For articles exclusively mentioning women, there are statistically significant
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Figure 5. Trends in the exclusive use of (“men” or “man”) or (“women” or “women”) in article
titles and abstracts (uncorrected).
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Figure 6. Trends in the exclusive use of “men” or “man” and “women” or “women” relating to
these groups in article titles and abstracts, based on accuracy checks in 1996 and 2000, linearly
interpolated, plus opposites.
differences between years (nonoverlapping confidence intervals), and, while there is an
increase from 1996 to 2002 and then a slight decline, there is no overall simple trend
(Figure 6). Annual changes may be due to the inclusion or exclusion of individual people-
related journals in Scopus. There is a clear declining trend for men, however.
The difference between the percentages of articles exclusively mentioning women and
exclusively relating to women in the opposite set (i.e., mentioning men or man but not women
or woman) in 1996 and 2020 is not statistically significant (substantially overlapping confi-
dence intervals), so despite the clear linear trend in the corresponding line (Figure 6), there
may have been no change. The same is true for men.
The Figure 6 lines for each gender can be added to estimate the overall proportion of
Scopus-indexed articles exclusively relating to women or exclusively relating to men. This
gives the main result for this subsection and addresses the second research question. There
were no statistically significant differences over the quarter century in either case (Figure 7).
More importantly, over twice as much academic research exclusively relates to women than to
men, with the ratio increasing slightly from 2.16 to 1 in 1996 to 2.25 to 1 in 2020.
3.3. Context of Studies Relating to Women or Men
The content analysis of 500 year-2020 article titles and abstracts mentioning women but not
men found that men were also studied, despite not being mentioned, in 14.8% of cases and a
further 1.2% were false matches (Table 3). For example, an abstract might report the propor-
tion of women in a study, or factors that only applied to the women investigated. In the remain-
ing articles, health-related factors (almost) exclusive to women accounted for well over half
(61.4%) the articles: Maternity (34.3%), Female-specific health issues (18.6%) and Breast can-
cer (8.6%). Some 16.2% of the articles were case reports of a woman medical patient present-
ing with an unusual set of symptoms. Women’s equality, parity, or empowerment was
Quantitative Science Studies
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Figure 7. Trends article title and abstracts exclusively relating to men or women, based on accu-
racy checks in 1996 and 2000, linearly interpolated.
discussed in 5% and violence against women in 1.7%. Obesity or weight management was
the focus of 1.0% of the articles. A wide range of medical and other topics accounted for the
remaining articles, but no extra classes could be found that included many papers.
A corresponding content analysis of article titles and abstracts mentioning men but not
women found that women were also studied, despite not being mentioned, in 20.6% of cases
and a further 1.8% were false matches (Table 4). In addition, 10.6% of the ostensible mentions
Table 3. A content analysis of reasons for Scopus 2020 article titles and abstracts mentioning women but not men (n = 500). This includes 14
articles with abstracts shorter than 500 characters. The classifications are in the online data supplement (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare
.14720922). Valid percentage excludes the last two categories.
Context
Maternity/pregnancy/childbirth
Articles
144
Percentage
28.8
Valid percentage
34.3
Female-specific health issues (e.g., gynaecology)
Patient case
Breast cancer
Women’s equality
Violence against women
Weight management
Other
Men also studied
False match
Total
78
68
36
21
7
4
62
74
6
15.6
13.6
7.2
4.2
1.4
0.8
12.4
14.8
1.2
18.6
16.2
8.6
5.0
1.7
1.0
14.8
500
100.0%
100.0%
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Researching women and men 1996–2020
Table 4. A content analysis of reasons for Scopus 2020 article titles and abstracts mentioning men
but not women (n = 500). The classifications are in the online data supplement (https://doi.org/10
.6084/m9.figshare.14720922). Valid percent excludes the last three categories.
Context
Patient case
Articles
150
Percentage
30.0
Valid percentage
44.8
9.0
7.2
6.6
6.0
3.6
23.0
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3
Men who have sex with men
Male-specific health issues (other)
Testicular and prostate cancer
Sport and exercise
Masculinity, fatherhood
Other
Women also studied
Sexist language
False match
Total
30
24
22
20
12
77
103
53
9
500
6.0
4.8
4.4
4.0
2.4
15.4
20.6
10.6
1.8
100.0%
100.0%
of men were additional false matches from sexist or noninclusive language that referred to all
genders collectively as men or man, such as “since men walked the earth,” “man-made,”
“man-machine interaction,” and “man-in-the-middle cyberattack.” From the remainder, men’s
health issues accounted for only 13.8% (including testicular and prostate cancer), although
44.8% of the rest were medical case reports of individual men presenting with unusual
symptoms.
There were relatively many articles about men who have sex with men, usually employing
this terminology but sometimes describing the similar demographics “gay men” or “sexual
minority men.” The relatively high coverage of these overlapping demographics seemed to
be due to the extra challenges with HIV and the need to promote safe sex practices. There
were no articles about female sexual minorities in the women-only set (i.e., Table 3). Nontriv-
ial numbers of articles discussed male sports or exercise investigations involving cohorts of
men (there were only two female sport/exercise articles in the women-only set of Table 3).
Presumably, the larger amount of professional male sport or a masculinity-related greater
tendency for males to consider performance in exercise accounts for the apparent male asso-
ciation of this topic. Masculinity was also investigated in 3.6%, including a few fatherhood-
related articles. There was no corresponding female-only investigation of femininity, although
gender norms for weight relate to some ideals of femininity (Nagata, Domingue et al., 2020),
and violence against women is an outcome of some types of masculinity, so the topics relate.
4. DISCUSSION
A limitation of this study is that the inclusion of gender information in an abstract is sometimes
stylistic. This particularly applies when a sample of people is studied and the researcher
includes gender information in the sample even though gender was not a variable in the
research (e.g., “we recruited 25 patients, including 12 males and 10 over 60”). The results
are also limited by the focus on journal articles. It seems likely, for example, that much impor-
tant gender research is published in edited volumes and books. The results are also limited by
Quantitative Science Studies
259
Researching women and men 1996–2020
the focus on Scopus. Moreover, the analysis of explicit mentions of men or women may hide
other types of topic androcentrism in the sense of choosing topics from a male perspective.
They may also partly reflect researchers framing studies to foreground their implications for
women or women’s equality to increase their perceived importance.
The increased percentage of research mentioning the words “person” or “people” in Scopus
might reflect an increase in university courses and lecturers focusing on service sector voca-
tions. For example, the rise of profession-focused degree courses, such as tourism, hospitality,
and event management, in addition to nursing training moving to universities in some coun-
tries, has presumably generated a need for academic research to support them (e.g., if lecturers
need PhDs to teach Master’s courses). The extent to which this change influences women:men
ratios for research objects is unclear, however. While extensive people-focused research might
naturally lead to more gender-focused research as part of a tendency to increase knowledge by
specialization, research topics without people also tend to have few female researchers
(Thelwall et al., 2019), and may therefore need research about their lack of female profes-
sionals or researchers.
As a triangulation check of the high women:men ratios found, Scopus was searched for
the number of journals with articles indexed in 2020 and the journal name containing
woman/women or man/men, for example, SRCTITLE(women OR woman) AND SRCTYPE( j)
AND DOCTYPE(ar) AND PUBYEAR IS 2020. This retrieved 2,562 journal articles in 45
women-titled journals (e.g., Women and Criminal Justice) compared to 353 articles in seven
men-titled journals (e.g., Journal of Men’s Health), excluding a journal with a sexist title (IEEE
Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems). The women:men ratios for both
journals and articles here greatly exceed the 2.25:1 found for articles exclusively mentioning
women or men in their titles in 2020. The greater number of women-titled journals presumably
reflects a reaction to the androcentrism identified by feminist critiques of science.
The increasing proportion of research focusing on women compared to men addresses one
of the five types of androcentrism identified by the feminist critique of science. As there is also
evidence of improvements in three of the others (see Section 1.1), this suggests that broad
progress has occurred in addressing the concerns, although parity clearly has not been
reached in the gender of scientists at least (UNESCO, 2021).
The relative scarcity of research focusing on men is potentially problematic given the long-
term societal problems due to men that are far from being resolved, such as violence against
women, men’s sexism (Schwartz et al., 2016), and the wider problems of toxic masculinity or
masculinist extremism (de Boise, 2019).
5. CONCLUSIONS
The results show that journal article titles/abstracts relating to women (adults, 18+) over the
past quarter century have been more common than those relating to men. This result is depen-
dent on the operationalization of the phrase “relating to,” as described in Section 2. This may
extend a trend of apparently decreasing male domination from the 1970s (Figure 1), although
the pre-1996 evidence is not strong. In terms of research exclusively relating to one of the two
genders analyzed here (women but not men; men but not women), research exclusively relat-
ing to women is now (2020) more than twice as prevalent as research exclusively relating to
men. This suggests that academia is redressing its original androcentrism and prejudice against
women in this regard, at least. It does not suggest that such prejudices have been eradicated
because research areas may still have androcentric assumptions that do not manifest in
Quantitative Science Studies
260
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Researching women and men 1996–2020
abstract or title words (e.g., by selecting male-centric research objects, such as predominantly
male types of work). In addition, as the feminist critique of science showed (Harding, 1986;
Keller, 1982), other types of androcentrism exist that have not been investigated here.
There is not a simple way to estimate the optimal gender ratio for current research, if there is
one, because of unknown overall gender differences in the need for research. These differ-
ences are demonstrated by the topics of the content analysis. Thus, this study cannot conclude
that there is “enough” research relating to women compared to research relating to men and
this is an issue that should be (and has sometimes been) tackled by subject specialists within
their domains (e.g., Flores et al., 2021; Traylor et al., 2020). Nevertheless, it seems very likely
that there has been a major shift since the early 1900s from an academic culture of treating
women as invisible to a 2020s culture in which past mistakes are recognized and academia is
taking health conditions that affect women seriously and also publishing a small but nontrivial
amount of research into gender equality. Moreover, the current female-favoring balance seems
appropriate and necessary, not only because of the complexity of maternity but also because
of the importance of eradicating sexism in society (even though this accounted for only 5% of
the woman-focused articles in 2020). It is therefore impossible to decide whether the current
ratio of 2.25:1 favoring women for journal articles relating to one of these two genders is
“about right,” too little, or too much. Nevertheless, this ratio and the general trends should
be encouraging for women considering a career in academia and for society as a whole.
AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
Mike Thelwall: Methodology, Writing–original draft, Writing–review & editing. Abrizah
Abdullah: Methodology, Writing–review & editing. Ruth Fairclough: Writing–review & editing.
COMPETING INTERESTS
The authors have no competing interests.
FUNDING INFORMATION
This research was not funded.
DATA AVAILABILITY
The processed data used to produce the tables and graphs are available in the supplementary
data files (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.14720922 and https://doi.org/10.6084/m9
.figshare.16680535). A subscription to Scopus and API access permission is required to repli-
cate the research, with the methods described above.
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