Women in the Shadow of Big Men: The Case of Canada Excellence Research Chairs

EasyChair Preprint no. 125

Abstract

Canada Excellence Research Chairs program—an award worth up to ten million dollars over seven years to attract and support world-renowned researchers and their teams to establish research programs in Government of Canada’s science and technology priority areas at Canadian universities—has been one of the most controversial governmental funding allocations in Canada. One of the main criticisms to this program is the absence of clear selection and recruitment criteria, including promulgation of standards for inclusion and diversity, which have resulted in lack of representation of women among Chairs. The main purpose of this study is to shed light on gender differences in scientific production and impact of publications induced by Canada Excellence Research Chairs program and to examine co-authorship collaboration patterns that are formed as a result of introduction of this program. Findings reveal that when Chairs are listed as main investigators of the scientific work (either last or corresponding authors), female-led papers receive higher rate of citations and are published in journals with higher impact. Although citation impact of papers that include collaborations with women are the highest, more than 78% of researchers of each gender repeat their collaborations, with their male peers on authoring more than one papers. Last but not least, this study concludes that collaborations with women are fragile and are dependent on the presence of central male researchers. Therefore, contributions of women to high impact research is effective as long as they are under the shadow of more central, influential and popular men.

Keyphrases: Bibliometrics, Canada Excellence Research Chairs Program, Co-Authorship Network Analysis, gender

@Booklet{EasyChair:125,
  author = {Gita Ghiasi and Vincent Larivière and Catherine Beaudry},
  title = {Women in the Shadow of Big Men: The Case of Canada Excellence Research Chairs},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint no. 125},
  doi = {10.29007/sxfq},
  year = {EasyChair, 2018}}