Gender in the Global Research Landscape Report

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A new research by Elsevier used NamSor Gender API along with other methods, to provide an analysis of research performance through a gender lens across 20 years, 12 geographies, and 27 subject areas. You can read the full report here or download the raw data. You can also join the discussion on WikiGender.

Thank You Elsevier for the citation!

Sociolinguistic features of the authors’ first names can also provide information on gender. For example, the name “Andrea” is understood as a feminine name in most languages, but in a few others (Italian, Albanian, Romansh, Istrian), it is considered to be a masculine name. We utilize a second data source, NamSor™ Applied Onomastics, which uses sociolinguistic characteristics to mine Big Data sources with its name recognition software, and assigns a quasi-probability that the bearer of a given name is a man (-1) or a woman (+1) depending on the individual’s location. We match the likely gender of frequent names (5 or more occurrences) with a quasi probability of less than -0.7 for masculine names and greater than +0.7 for feminine names to the remainder of the Scopus author profiles (with first name and country of origin) for which we are unable to match using Genderize.io.

We have done some huge effort in 2017 to overcome the complexity of using onomastics (the science of proper names) to infer and assign gender to African and Arab names. For Asian names, we also recognize cases when assigning a gender is not possible and return a neutral value.

There are now over 36 scientific papers citing NamSor and bringing academic credibility to our gender classification software. Plus, there is a brand new varo R package on GitHub maintained by Charles Crabtree and Volha Chykina (volhachykina.org), which will facilitate adoption by statisticians and data analysts.

Also, we are open to scientific collaboration with researchers in academia, who have an interest in : Diasporas, migration, brain drain, ethnic diversity / analysis of discrimination, sociology and anthropology – who would be interested to use our other product, NamSor Origin.

About NamSor

NamSor™ Applied Onomastics is a European vendor of sociolinguistics software (NamSor sorts names). NamSor mission is to help understand international flows of money, ideas and people. We proudly support Gender Gap Grader.
Reach us at: contact@namsor.com