Gender Disparities in Science? Dropout, Productivity, Collaborations and Success of Male and Female Computer Scientists

Scientific collaborations shape novel ideas and new discoveries and help scientists to advance their scientific career through publishing high impact publications and grant proposals. Recent studies however show that gender inequality is still present in many scientific practices ranging from hiring to peer review processes and grant applications. While empirical findings highlight that collaborations impact success and gender inequality is present in science, we know little about gender-specific differences in collaboration patterns, how they change over time and how they impact scientific success. In this paper we close this gap by studying gender-differences in dropout rates, productivity and collaboration patterns of more than one million computer scientists over the course of 47 years. We investigate which collaboration patterns are related with scientific success and if these patterns are similar for male and female scientists. Our results highlight that while subtle gender disparities in dropout rates, productivity and collaboration patterns exist, successful male and female scientists reveal the same collaboration patterns: compared with scientists in the same career age, they tend to collaborate with more colleagues than other scientists, establish longer lasting and repetitive collaborations, bring people together that have not been collaborating before and collaborate with successful scientists.