Language, economic, and gender disparities widen the scientific productivity gap

Scientific communities need to understand and eliminate barriers that prevent scientists from reaching their full potential. However, the combined impact of individuals’ linguistic, economic, and gender backgrounds on their scientific productivity is poorly understood. Using a survey of 908 environmental scientists, we show that being a woman is associated with up to a 45% reduction in the number of English-language publications, compared to men. Being a non-native English speaker from a low-income country is associated with a further 25% reduction. The linguistic and economic productivity gap narrows when based on the total number of English- and non-English-language publications. We call for an explicit effort to consider linguistic, economic, and gender backgrounds and incorporate non-English-language publications when assessing the performance and contribution of scientists. DOI https://doi.org/10.32942/X2F914 Subjects Environmental Studies

Equity, inequality, Diversity, Inclusion, language barriers, economic barriers, gender indentity, under-represented group, scientific productivity Dates Published: 2024-11-01 05:07 License CC BY Attribution 4.0 International Additional Metadata Conflict of interest statement: None Data and Code Availability Statement: We are unable to make data on participants’ responses to the survey questions publicly available, as per our agreement with the University of Queensland Ethics office (committee: Science Low and Negligible Risk Committee, approval number: 2021/HE000566) and due to the confidentiality of the data. All codes used in the analysis are available at: https://osf.io/w6cu3. Language: English