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Researching women and men 1996-2020: Is androcentrism still dominant?
Thelwall, Michael Abdullah, Abrizah Fairclough, Ruth
Thelwall, Michael
Abdullah, Abrizah
Fairclough, Ruth
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2021-12-27
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Abstract
This article assesses the balance of research concerning women and men over the past quarter century using the crude heuristic of counting Scopus-indexed journal articles relating to women or men, as suggested by their titles or abstracts. A manual checking procedure together with a word-based heuristic was used to identify whether an article related to women or men. The heuristic includes both explicit mentions of women and men, implicit mentions, and a set of gender-focused health issues and medical terminology. Based on the results, more published articles now relate to women than to men. Moreover, more than twice as many articles relate exclusively to women than exclusively to men, with the ratio increasing from 2.16 to 1 in 1996 to 2.25 to 1 in 2020. Monogender articles mostly addressed primarily female health issues (maternity, breast cancer, cervical cancer) with fewer about primarily male health issues (testicular cancer, pancreatic cancer, health needs of men who have sex with men). Some articles also explicitly addressed gender inequality, such as empowering women entrepreneurs. The findings suggests that the androcentrism of early science has eroded in terms of research topics. This apparent progress should be encouraging for women researchers and society.
Citation
Thelwall, M., Abdullah, A. and Fairclough, R. (2022) Researching women and men 1996-2020: Is androcentrism still dominant? Quantitative Science Studies, 3 (1), pp. 244–264.
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Journal article
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en
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© 2021 The Authors. Published by MIT Press. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence.
The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00173
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2641-3337