Gender disparities in Russian academia: a bibliometric analysis

Scientometrics. 2022. Vol. 127. No. 6. P. 3577–3591.

Pilkina M., Lovakov A.

The problem of gender disparities in various areas of society has long been well known and identified in most countries. Russian academia is no exception. This paper describes the representation of Russian men and women authors in terms of research production. The analysis is based on 121,953 papers with at least one Russian author, covered by Web of Science (WoS) and published between 2017 and 2019. The results demonstrate that there are still evident signs of gender disparities. Women remain underrepresented in their overall presence and performance almost in all disciplines and generally in academia. In all research fields, women’s mean number of publications is lower than analogous indicators for men. Although some areas have relative gender parity and even more women authors, the gap between both genders remains stable for most disciplines. As a result, despite some improvements in women’s research performance, Russian academia is the case, demonstrating that without a gender policy in both Russian political and science systems, it is complicated to eliminate gender inequality.

Keywords: Russia, гендер, академическая профессия, gender, академическая профессия в России, academia, гендер в науке, research production

Publication based on the results of: Higher education market agents in the digitalization context: data as a basis for analyzing incentives and strategies (2022)