Abstract
Questions about gender differences in the workplace usually attract much attention—but often generate more heat than light. To examine gender differences in several facets of scientific productivity and impact, a quantitative, scientometric approach is employed. Analyzing a sample of industrial and organizational psychologists (N authors = 4234; N publications = 46,656), this study raises both questions and concerns about gender differences in research, by showing that female and male I–O psychologists differ with regard to publication output (fewer publications authored by female researchers), impact (heterogeneous, indicator-dependent gender differences), their publication career courses (male researchers’ periods of active publishing last longer and show longer interruptions), and research interests (only marginal gender differences). In order to get a glimpse of future developments, we repeated all analyses with the student subsample and found nearly no gender differences, suggesting a more gender-balanced future. Thus, this study gives an overview over the status quo of gender differences in an entire psychological sub-discipline. Future research will have to examine whether these gender differences are volitional in nature or the manifestation of external constraints.
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Notes
Although the first two indicators are probably the most famous, first authorship is also a common indicator of scientific success, for example but not only, in psychology (e.g., Adair and Huynh 2012; Barrios et al. 2013; Venkatraman 2010). The indicator is based on the idea that “[t]he general rule is that the name of principal contributor should appear first” (American Psychological Association 2009b, p. 19).
Due to a technical problem, queries of 53 SIOP members failed and were repeated in March/April 2015. This data collection complemented the initial data set with 455 publications (authored by 49 SIOP members). Inclusion criteria were applied to the complete data set.
Although SIOP members’ gender was either male or female in our data, we acknowledge the existence of more than two sex or gender categories (American Psychological Association 2011).
We are aware that calculating individual researchers’ JIF has been rightfully criticized (e.g., Moed 2002). We discuss this issue in detail in the Limitations section.
Analyses for RQ1–RQ6 were also repeated with the subsample of peer-reviewed journals. The results matched those of the full sample.
As one reviewer correctly pointed out, excluding mostly female researchers who have not published yet from the sample could even underestimate the true gender differences in scientific productivity.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Tracy L. Vanneman from the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, who provided us with their member list under the condition that our results will remain anonymous (i.e., no information about individual authors), and Ulrich Herb and Matthias Müller from the Saarland University and State Library for their support in the planning phase of this project. Finally, we thank the R community for providing the answers to all of our questions on data analyses.
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Cornelius König and Clemens Fell have contributed equally to this manuscript.
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König, C.J., Fell, C.B., Kellnhofer, L. et al. Are there gender differences among researchers from industrial/organizational psychology?. Scientometrics 105, 1931–1952 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-015-1646-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-015-1646-y