Full citation
Kraker, P., et al.(2017). Deliverable D4.1 - Practices evaluation and mapping: Methods, tools and user needs. http://openup-h2020.eu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/OpenUP_D4.1_Practices-evaluation-and-mapping.-Methods-tools-and-user-needs.pdf
Summary
Albeit the achieved progresses towards gender equality in research and innovation during the past few years, a range of gender differences and inequalities persist (European Commission 2016). For example, women continue to be underrepresented in science and technology, and research in general. This imbalance is also reflected in dissemination. In a large-scale study of more than 5.4 million research papers with more than 27 million authorships (Larivière et al. 2013), the authors found that women represent fewer than 30% of authorships. This is a worldwide phenomenon, as men dominate authorship in all but a few countries. When it comes to first authorship, men are twice as likely to be first author as women.
There are indications from smaller-scale studies that this domination carries over to certain innovative dissemination channels. In a study of the aggregator of scientific blogs, ResearchBlogging.org, Shema et al. (2012) found that 72% of the 126 blogs analysed had only male authors. Mikki et al. (2015) investigated the digital presence of Norwegian scholars and found that women were underrepresented in a number of services such as ORCiD and Google Scholar Profiles - with the exception were Academia.edu and ResearchGate, where the share of women was comparable to the share of male researchers in the sample.
Gender stereotyping is a topic that has mostly been studied in research on textbooks, but occasionally also in academic writing (see e.g. Martin 1991). Another gender-related topic regarding dissemination is the information-seeking behaviour of target audiences, which is studied particularly in medicine; examples are gender differences observed in patients (Carpenter et al. 2011) and general practitioners (Le 2016). For example, Carpenter et al. report that female patients with a rare illness were more likely to use the Internet as information source than their male counterparts.