The Gender Gap in Computer Science — A Bibliometric Analysis

We’re happy to share new research conducted by Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), on The Gender Gap in Computer Science — A Bibliometric Analysis which is using NamSor Gender API to assign gender to scientists’ names.

Sandra Mattauch, Katja Lohmann, Frank Hannig, Daniel Lohmann and Jürgen Teich
Computer Networks and Communication Systems Dept. of Computer Science, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany

Abstract— The low share of women in computer science is documented by many surveys. Most of these studies are based on registrations or enrolments of universities or other scientific institutions. In this paper, we present a new approach to a) analyse the gender gap in the group of scientists that are currently active in research and b) classify differences for different fields of computer science. This group comprises professors, industrial researchers, senior lecturers, postdoctoral researchers, and doctoral students shortly before finishing their theses. The proportion of women in a specific scientific area of computer science might provide valuable information for strategies to recruit women as postdocs or professors.

For this study, the researchers worked with representative and high quality data, and used the DBLP Computer Science Bibliography, which lists the major computer science journals and conference proceedings, as database.

We’re grateful to the researchers for their feedback and having found room for improvement on NamSor gender classification for Indian names. We’re currently reviewing the study results and we’ve planned to make improvements in the API’s next version.

You will find a very useful analysis of NamSor Gender API accuracy, precision and recall rates in Science-Metrix report for the on-going NSF study.

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