Photo/Illutration A general meeting of the Science Council of Japan takes place in Tokyo’s Minato Ward in October. (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

Gender inequality in academia seems to be stubbornly entrenched in Japan, so much so that even China and South Korea have a better record in this area.

This assertion, based on career duration and number of citations,  follows a study by researchers from Japan and the United State of 100 million academic papers released between 1950 and 2020.

“Women must be permitted to hold research positions longer if the gender gap in Japanese academia is to diminish,” said Naoki Masuda, a network science professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, who is part of the team.

“I hope a range of more drastic approaches will be taken, such as hiring more female teachers at colleges and universities as well as finding ways to allow woman to continue their studies while raising families.”

Other team members were from Kobe University, the Tokyo Institute of Technology and Kyoto University. They sought to determine with at least 90 percent accuracy the gender of the authors of academic papers based on accepted readings of names for men and women.

They also looked at career records, citation practices and other factors from the perspective of gender difference. The study covered academics in Japan, South Korea and China, as well as “other” countries, primarily in Europe, and the United States.

The findings showed more men than women were working as researchers in all the countries studied. The gender disparity was larger for Japan, China and South Korea, compared with Europe, the United States and elsewhere.

The number of papers made publicly available throughout the duration of an academic’s career was 42.6 percent smaller for women than men in Japan. This whopping imbalance compared with 9.3 percent, 20.2 percent and 31.2 percent in China, South Korea and other nations, respectively.

The annual average of papers submitted was nearly the same between both genders in all the countries studied.

Taking this into account, a reason for the gender disparity in publications seems to lie in the fact that women tend to have shorter academic careers than their male counterparts. For example, the careers of female academics in Japan were 39.6 percent shorter than those for men.

Another possible cause seems to be that women are less frequently cited as co-authors of research papers.

The index for citation frequency was 19.9 percent lower for women than men in Japan. The figure was rather among women in China and South Korea.

A more detailed analysis revealed papers whose first and last authors are men had been cited aggressively, whereas those by female authors were rarely been cited.

The tendency to refer more to academic papers written by men was particularly apparent in Japan, China and South Korea. This prejudice manifested itself most in Japan.

“We succeeded in making a socially important achievement by analyzing the gender inequality in academia quantitatively based on big data via research,” noted Kazuki Nakajima, a team member, who also serves as an assistant professor of computerized social science in Tokyo Metropolitan University.

He went on to say, “This problem is seen globally as a social challenge and can be found in peer review, researcher employment and other processes, too. We will be committing ourselves to analyzing data from various angles to raise a question in society from now.”

The results have been published in the specialized international magazine Journal of Informetrics at (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2023.101460).

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