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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.05801 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05801/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 19 Apr 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Adversarial Inter-Group Link Injection Degrades the Fairness of Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05957/) (2022)
- [Women, artificial intelligence, and key positions in collaboration networks: Towards a more equal scientific ecosystem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12339/) (2022)
- [Minorities in networks and algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07113/) (2022)
- [Bridging Through Absence: How Comeback Researchers Bridge Knowledge Gaps Through Structural Re-emergence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21926/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Scientific collaborations shape ideas as well as innovations and are both the substrate for, and the outcome of, academic careers. Recent studies show that gender inequality is still present in many scientific practices ranging from hiring to peer-review processes and grant applications. In this work, we investigate gender-specific differences in collaboration patterns of more than one million computer scientists over the course of 47 years. We explore how these patterns change over years and career ages and how they impact scientific success. Our results highlight that successful male and female scientists reveal the same collaboration patterns: compared to scientists in the same career age, they tend to collaborate with more colleagues than other scientists, seek innovations as brokers and establish longer-lasting and more repetitive collaborations. However, women are on average less likely to adapt the collaboration patterns that are related with success, more likely to embed into ego networks devoid of structural holes, and they exhibit stronger gender homophily as well as a consistently higher dropout rate than men in all career ages.