Meta-research: The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the gender gap in research productivity within academia
- University of Sheffield, United Kingdom
- University of Bergen, Norway
- Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany
- University of Groningen, Netherlands
- Netherlands Institute of Ecology, Netherlands
Abstract
Measuring research productivity to gauge academic performance is flawed because it is biased against certain groups of researchers. Women researchers are disadvantaged because gender roles and unconscious biases, operating both at home and in academia, can affect research productivity. Here, we bring together existing studies to show that the gender gap in research productivity increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the relative research productivity of women declining compared to the pre-pandemic period.
Data availability
All data and materials to reproduce the meta-analysis can be found at Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8039148.
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The authors declare that there was no funding for this work.
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© 2023, Lee et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Meta-research: The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the gender gap in research productivity within academia
eLife 12:e85427.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.85427
