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An exploration of gender gap using advanced data science tools: actuarial research community

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Abstract

This paper explores the role of gender gap in the actuarial research community with advanced data science tools. The web scraping tools were employed to create a database of publications that encompasses six major actuarial journals. This database includes the article names, authors’ names, publication year, volume, and the number of citations for the time period 2005–2018. The advanced tools built as part of the R software were used to perform gender classification based on the author’s name. Further, we developed a social network analysis by gender in order to analyze the collaborative structure and other forms of interaction within the actuarial research community. A Poisson mixture model was used to identify major clusters with respect to the frequency of citations by gender across the six journals. The analysis showed that women’s publishing and citation networks are more isolated and have fewer ties than male networks. The paper contributes to the broader literature on the “Matthew effect” in academia. We hope that our study will improve understanding of the gender gap within the actuarial research community and initiate a discussion that will lead to developing strategies for a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable community.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Dr. Bettina Grün for her valuable feedback and discussion that improved the content of this paper. We also appreciate the guidance received on using the flexmix package. Additional appreciation is extended to those participants in the 2018 Women in Statistics and Data Science Conference and the 54th Actuarial Research Conference whose support reassured us about the importance of this topic. Finally, we would like to thank the Editor and the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and generous support.

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  1. Miami University, Oxford, OH, USA

    Mengyu Yu, Mazie Krehbiel, Samantha Thompson & Tatjana Miljkovic

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  1. Mengyu Yu
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  2. Mazie Krehbiel
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  4. Tatjana Miljkovic
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Correspondence to Tatjana Miljkovic.

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Yu, M., Krehbiel, M., Thompson, S. et al. An exploration of gender gap using advanced data science tools: actuarial research community. Scientometrics 123, 767–789 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03412-w

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