Despite a more favourable initial representation of women in undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, structural gender inequities manifest and unfold throughout the research academic life course (Silander et al. 2013). Such inequities are associated with unequal division of academic labour, with women performing significantly more academic service than men (Guarino & Borden, 2017); and disparate involvement in domestic and care work of male and female researchers (Cervia & Biancheri, 2017), leading to increased gender gaps in research production, leadership and collaboration, and, consequently, in academic promotion (Winslow & Davis, 2016).

Individual resources and characteristics, such as researchers’ seniority (position), field of study and gender, are among the strongest predictors of academic productivity and collaboration (Silander et al. 2013) there being a need to study all these factors in combination (Silander et al., 2013) from a longitudinal approach (Winslow and Davis, 2016).

In Latin America, the number of publications in the social sciences has been growing spectacularly over the last decade and especially in educational research, with the case of Chile being notorious (Guzmán-Valenzuela et al., 2022). However, with few exceptions, the role of researchers' gender on this trend has not received significant attention in Chile or was studied more than a decade ago (Bernasconi, 2010).

This study investigates gendered patterns of research dropout, output, leadership and collaboration across Chilean educational researchers’ careers, using life course and social network approaches. The research question of this study is as follows: How do the effects of gender on research dropout, article publication, leadership and collaboration patterns manifest across the career life course of Chilean education researchers?

Framework

Female participation in science and research is not equal to that of men (Poczatková & Křibíková, 2017). Several studies have shown that female scientists publish less (Winslow & Davis, 2016), are less cited and tend to be first authors less frequently (UNESCO, 2021).

In examining longitudinal trends in participation and productivity, it was found in the USA that the increase in participation of women in science over the past 60 years was accompanied by an increase of gender differences in both research productivity and impact (Huang et al., 2020). This imbalance increased during the COVID pandemic having a negative impact on the number of women scientific publications (Pinho-Gomes et al., 2020). 

Regarding authorship, ‘globally, women account for fewer than 30% of fractionalised authorships, whereas men represent slightly more than 70%. (Larivière et al., 2013, p. 212). Further, articles with female key authors are less frequently cited than articles with male key authors, which is also explained by the fact that female scientists publish less (UNESCO, 2021). Gender also plays a role in patterns of academic collaboration (Mamtani et. al, 2020). Overall, women tend to build less homophilic and more egalitarian networks than men (Araújo et al., 2017; Díaz-Faes et al., 2020).

Furthermore, women academics tend to abandon academia at an early stage (Gasser & Shaffer, 2014) without necessarily following a progressive development through subsequent stages. This discontinuity across the academic life course has given way to what has been called ‘leaky pipeline’ in academia and in which personal and institutional factors work together so as to push women away from pursuing an academic career. Some studies have focused on the leak that takes place between the early academic years in women’s trajectories and the later years although it is recognised that more research is needed (Light, 2013).

This study examined the research trajectories of 5.556 authors (52.7% of which are women) who published, at least once between 2011 and 2021, in Scopus-indexed education and education psychology journals as an author affiliated to a Chilean institution. Data analysis techniques entailed descriptive analysis, survival (duration) models (to model months to research dropout), and models for count and social network models. These methods helped the researchers gain insights into different aspects of research, such as dropout rates, publication numbers, and collaboration patterns. More specifically, the following analyses were performed: - Survival model: the analysis looked at how long researchers continued to do research before they stopped. A tool called the Kaplan-Meier estimator was used to compare the time between a researcher's first and last publication. Cox proportional hazard models were used to see if gender had an effect on the likelihood of dropping out of research. Models were fitted using the survival package in R. - Poisson regressions were used to understand how many publications each researcher had and whether gender played a role. Equations were used to model the relationship between gender and number of publications. The analysis also took into account the interaction between gender and experience to examine if the effect of gender varied depending on the level of experience. - Finally, a method called Bipartite Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGMs) was used to study collaboration between researchers. This analysis looked at factors such as gender, experience and country/region of affiliation to see if they influenced the likelihood of academic collaboration. The analysis looked at data from different years and used special statistical techniques to combine the results.

Results show that: (i) the number of both male and female authors increased rapidly from 2011 to 2021, although with a stable slightly lower representation of women; (ii) the percentage of articles that were authored only by males decreased, while the proportion of mixed-gender articles increased, and the proportion of articles authored only by females remained stable, and overall, suggesting that gender homophily in co-authorship has decreased over time in the field (iii) there is a significant decrease in the relative participation of women as they become more senior, this is, female researchers stop publishing at a significantly earlier career stage than their male peers; (iv) there is a significant gender gap in academic productivity, that has widened during the last 12 years, and was particularly large between 2019 and 2021 (coinciding with Chile’s social outbreak and the Covid-19 pandemic), and that consists of a lower average number of article authorships per year for female junior researchers, compared to their male junior colleagues; (v) for very junior male researchers, national collaborations were somewhat more predominant than international non-LATAM collaborations, while the opposite seemed to be true for their junior female colleagues, and; (vi) overall, we did not find significant gender differences in research leadership. Potential explanations and implications for policy, at both national and institutional levels, are discussed.

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