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Iranian women in science: a gender study of scientic productivity in an Islamic country

Mehrnoush Mozaffarian
CIBER, School of Library, Archive and Information Studies (SLAIS), University College London, London, UK, and

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Received 6 April 2008 Revised 7 May 2008 Accepted 15 May 2008

Hamid R. Jamali
CIBER, Department of Educational Technology, Faculty of Psychology and Education, Tarbiat Moallem University, Tehran, Iran
Abstract
Purpose The aim of the paper is to explore and test gender differences in the authorship of Iranian journal articles. Design/methodology/approach A list of articles published by Iranian authors in ISI journals in 2003 was obtained from the Web of Science. The names of authors were searched in a specic database as well as the web to nd their rst names and hence their gender. The articles were then broken down by gender and subject category. International collaborations of the authors were also investigated. Findings The productivity of female authors at the individual level as measured by article per author share was lower than male authors. In total, females accounted for 6 per cent and males for 94 per cent of the articles published in 2003. A chi-square test showed that female contribution was signicantly lower than expected. Originality/value The study is the rst to investigate gender participation in scientic productivity in Iran and most likely in a Muslim country. The article highlights the need for qualitative studies on the gender aspect of scientic productivity in Muslim countries. Keywords Productivity rate, Research work, Academic staff, Gender, Women, Iran Paper type Research paper

Introduction Understanding the gender distribution of scientic production at national or institutional level is an important issue in the sociology of science and also for policy makers and decision makers in higher education and the labour market. Several national and international policies and strategies[1] have been developed to examine and improve womens opportunity in academic research and publication, and it is therefore necessary to devise means to monitor their success (Leta, 2003, p. 340). It is also important for supporting the growing social and political commitment to promote and monitor womens participation in the different elds of science. This issue is more critical in countries with low gender-related development index[2] (GDI), such as developing countries and even more critical in Islamic countries where women are thought to be facing limitations for participating in society. Iran is one of these countries whose GDI is ranked 94 among 177 countries[3]
The authors would like to thank Dr Ian Rowlands for his invaluable suggestions.

Aslib Proceedings: New Information Perspectives Vol. 60 No. 5, 2008 pp. 463-473 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0001-253X DOI 10.1108/00012530810908193

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(Human Development Report, 2008). To gain a better understanding of the participation of women in Iranian scientic production, this paper investigates articles published in ISI ranked journals. The study contributes in the less-researched eld of the gender study in scientic productivity. The study will shed some light on the situation of womens contribution in science in an ambitious Islamic country. Some background on Iran Iran is a developing country with a population of slightly more than 70 million people. The importance of scientic development has increased in the eyes of Iranian statesmen in the last decade. Iran is investing heavily in science now, after decades of neglect and science spending has climbed steadily, from about 0.2 per cent of gross domestic product in 1990 to 0.65 per cent in 2005 (Stone, 2005, p. 1802). The population of Iran has nearly doubled in less than 25 years, while the number of university students has increased more than ten times and 720 PhD degrees were awarded just in basic sciences during the ten years prior to 2004. According to Mehrdad et al. (2004, p. 79):
[. . .] despite the great difculties that Iranian scientists have been facing for more than two decades (as a consequence of a social revolution, eight years of a destructive war imposed by Iraq, excessive brain drain, discriminatory practices by some international journals in publishing Iranian articles, and unfair sanctions imposed by the industrialised countries), Irans science is still thriving.

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And the number of yearly scientic publications is increasing. The growth in the number of students and science spending is also reected in the number of articles published by Iranian scholars in international journals. Moin et al. (2005) reviewed science production in Iran (1967-2003) and compared it with 15 countries in the year 2000. During these years Irans relative share in global scientic output increased from 0.0003 per cent in 1970 to 0.29 per cent in 2003. Comparing the ratio of science output to gross national product, Iran stood at the 13th place among 16 countries in 2000. An important issue in this landscape of scientic development and productivity in Iran is the participation of women in science, especially as there is much debate in the western media about womens rights and freedom and their contribution in the civil society in Islamic countries. Unlike the negative stereotype picture illustrated in the western media, the statistics show promising eagerness and determination among Iranian women for work in academia and research elds. The latest statistics from the Statistical Centre of Iran (2008) show that there were about 2,829,000 enrolled students in the academic year 2006-2007 of which 52 per cent were female and 48 per cent male. About 63,000 of these students were studying at doctorate level, an indication of research potential in Iran. The number of female students has increased steadily during the last decade in a challenging way (Harrison, 2006). The ranks of women in academia swelled during Khatamis two terms of presidency (of 28,000 scientists in Iranian universities in 2005, 5,400 (about 19 per cent) were women; Stone, 2005, p. 1802). To put this gure in context and compare it with a developed country, about 36 per cent of 111,410 full-time academic staff in the UK were female in the academic year 2005-2006 (HESA, 2007). Ghorbani and Tung (2007, p. 388) in a qualitative study showed that:
[W]omen in Iran have access to most elds of study at university and can work in most occupations of their choice. Furthermore, they appear to be fairly well represented,

as compared to other Islamic nations, in the workplace, at managerial/professional positions, and in the legislature[. . .] This reality appears to run contrary to the popular perception that women in these countries are fully veiled and prevented from active participation in society. In some respects, the situation of women in Iran is similar, albeit different in magnitude, to their counterparts in high GDI countries that practice greater gender equality and have espoused afrmative action legislation.

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Aims and objectives The aim of the present work is to explore and test gender differences in the authorship of Iranian journal articles. In other words, the article seeks to determine whether the scientic productivity of Iranian female scholars differs quantitatively from that of male scholars and if so, how. In this paper, publication of journal articles in ISI ranked journals is considered as a valid measure of scientic productivity (Fox, 1983, p. 285). More specically the study tries to answer the following research questions: RQ1. What is the gender distribution of Iranian authors in ISI indexed journals in 2003? RQ2. What is the gender distribution of Iranian authors in different subject areas? RQ3. What is the gender distribution of Iranian authors international collaboration? RQ4. What is the relative productivity of men and women? Literature review Numerous studies in the past have found that female scientists publish at slower rates than male scientists (Xie and Shauman, 1999, p. 10). Cole and Zuckerman (1984) characterised this gender gap in publication rates as the productivity puzzle. Ferber (1986) conducted a citation analysis in the eld of economics and Davenport and Snyder (1995) carried out a citation analysis in the eld of sociology. Both studies revealed a lower than expected number of female authors and also those female authors were under-cited, especially by male citing authors. One of the studies that showed a slower rate of publication by women was that by Long (1992, p. 159). Long maintained that the sex of a scholar is an important source of variation in scientic productivity. He reviewed the literature and it showed that the lower productivity of females has been established in a dozen studies covering a relatively wide number of elds. One measure for studying the relative productivity of female scholars is their publications. In other words, scientic productivity is measured in terms of the published output (Gupta et al., 1999, p. 269). Bibliometrics is one of the methods applied for the study of this area. However, there are not many articles on gender differences that rely on bibliometric techniques. This might be because bibliometric studies in this area face a signicant problem, which is identifying the gender of authors. The source of data in bibliometric studies is normally ISI Web of Science which does not give the full version of authors rst names[4] and this makes it hard to identify their gender. This problem is less signicant in some cultures. For example, in Iceland the gender of individuals can be discovered by their surnames. Icelandic male surnames mostly end in sson whilst female last names end in dotti (Lewsion, 2001, p. 29). Using this method, Lewisons (2001) study based on ISI data showed that there has been a rise in

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female output in Iceland from 8 per cent to 30 per cent from 1980 to 2000. The results also revealed that women were less likely to be working on international projects than men. Many Polish names also have gender endings. For example, those whose surnames end with -ski, -cki or -owy are male and those whose surnames end with with -ska, -cka or -owa are female. Webster (2001) used this characteristic and studied the gender distribution of Polish articles in the science citation index between 1980 and 1999. The study showed that womens share of publications declined modestly from about 35 per cent after the end of socialism but was almost back to its earlier level at the time the study was conducted. Both in Websters and Lewisons studies there was a clear tendency for women to be relatively much more active in biomedicine and the life sciences, and less so in the exact sciences such as physics and mathematics. In Brazil a study (Leta, 2003) was conducted to measure the Brazilian female contribution in scientic production. The aim of the study was to monitor the Brazilian female effect in scientic production because of the several policies that had been developed earlier to improve womens status in science. The study also aimed to discover whether there was a difference between Brazilian male and female academics publication in the three elds of immunology, oceanology, and astronomy in terms of quality and quantity. The data for this research was obtained from the ISI Web of Science. Information on the sex, age, and position of the authors was obtained from the Brazilian National Council for Scientic and Technological Development (CNPq, Portuguese acronym). CNPq is a Brazilian federal research support agency linked to the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology of Brazil. This institute has created a database that includes general information on Brazilian researchers and about 56,500 names are registered on it. The researcher created a database in MS Excel spreadsheets that was based on the data obtained from ISI and CNPq. The result of the study suggested that men and women had published a similar number of articles and they had equally collaborated with international authors despite evidence of discrimination against women in the scientic peer review process before publishing a paper (Leta, 2003, p. 351). Besides quantitative studies, there have been some qualitative studies that have sought to nd reasons that cause the productivity puzzle. These studies identied a range of reasons and differences that result in the productivity difference between men and women. Long (1992) tried to measure sex differences between American biochemists and found indications that although females write less they write better quality papers. Papers by females on average received more citations than those by males. Also the smaller number of citations to womens papers was associated with the smaller number of papers written by women not their quality. Xie and Shaumans (1998) study concluded that women are less likely than men to have the personal characteristics, structural positions, and facilitating resources that are conductive to publication. A survey study of young Croatian scientists by Prpic (2002) showed that the number of scientic papers women publish is strongly inuenced by their position in the social organization of science. A critical review by Rothausen-Vange et al. (2005) suggested that: rstly, due to various kinds of sex and gender discriminations, women have to work twice as hard for the same rewards; secondly, according to institutional pressure to hire and promote women faculty, women are held to lower productivity standards and nally, women themselves tend to choose jobs that are more exible and less prestigious than those men select.

In Iran, although many scientometric studies have been carried out on knowledge production (Etemad, 2003), no studies on gender participation have been conducted and the present study is the rst one to investigate this area. Methodology The ISI Web of Science database was used to identify articles published by Iranian authors in the year 2003. The total number of articles identied was 2,782. The data were entered into an excel spreadsheet and a database was created for the authors of the articles. Forenames of the authors were needed in order to identify their gender. However, in the ISI database the forenames of the authors are not given, just the initial letter of each forename. Therefore, authors names had to be re-searched in order to identify their forenames and hence their gender. To do this, two methods were applied: (1) The Iranian Ministry of Science, Research and Technology publishes a database (on CD-ROM) that contains a list of Iranian academics including their disciplines and afliation as well as their full names. Assuming that a considerable number of articles must have been written by academics, each surname was looked up in the database. Knowing the afliation of the authors and the initials of their forenames many authors were identied. However, some of the authors could not be identied and therefore a second method was used. (2) General searching on the web using the google search engine was used to identify the remaining number of the authors that could not be identied in the aforementioned database. Here, the assumption was that the articles might have been written by graduate students and independent researchers and that there might be some information available about them on the web, whether on their personal homepages or the university web sites. In order to conduct the search, the surnames were searched along with the title of the paper using the AND operator. This method revealed the identity of a considerable number of authors. By using these two methods, the authors of 2,626 articles out of the total number of 2,782 articles, were identied by gender. The remaining articles (156) were eliminated from the study. Therefore, the study was carried out using a total of 2,626 articles. These were classied using the subject categories of the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology in order to nd out in which elds women are more (or less) active than men. Also the gender distribution of authors international collaborations was noted. Results As Table I shows, 352 articles (13.4 per cent) were found to have at least one female author, while the other 2,274 articles (86.6 per cent) were published only by men. The total number of Iranian authors in the year of study was 4,528, which included 435 (9.6 per cent) female and 4,093 (90.4 per cent) male scholars. However, in the academic year
Number Articles with only male contribution Articles with female contribution Total 2,274 352 2,626 Per cent 86.6 13.4 100

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Table I. Gender distribution of articles published by Iranians in ISI journals

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2002-2003 16.45 per cent of 40,054 faculty members in Irans higher education were female (Ghiasi, 2003, p. 133). This means that 435 women contributed in 352 articles while the remaining 2,274 articles were written exclusively by men. Table II relates. Table III presents a breakdown of the articles by the number of female authors contributing to them. The maximum number of female authors contributing to a paper was six and there was only one article that had six women amongst their authors; 296 articles had only one female among their authors. The number of articles with two female contributing authors was 32 and the number of articles with three female contributing authors was 23. In 2,274 articles no female authors contributed (86.6 per cent of all articles). To gain a rough estimation of the amount of the contribution of female authors in the articles, the fraction of female authors in each article was calculated (Table IV). The most common fraction of contribution was one female author collaborating with one male author (1/2 or 0.5 female ratio). Ninety-nine articles fell in this category. The second common ratio of contribution by women was one female and two male authors (1/3 female ratio) as 82 articles belonged to this category. There were only 25 articles that were solely written by women (1/1 female ratio). We calculated the sum of the females fractional contribution in order to gain a more accurate estimate of females contribution in the articles. To do this we multiplied each
Gender Number 4,093 435 4,528 Per cent 90.4 9.6 100

Table II. Distribution of male and female authors

Male Female Total

Number of articles 2,274 296 32 23 1 Total: 2,626

Number of females 0 1 2 3 6

Percentage of articles 86.6 11.3 1.2 0.86 0.04 100

Table III. Number of contributing female authors in each article

Female ratio 1/1 1/2 1/3 1/4 1/5 1/6 1/7 1/8 1/9

Number of articles 25 99 82 41 18 12 6 6 4

Female ratio 1/10 1/14 2/3 2/5 2/7 3/4 3/5 3/19 6/14

Number of articles 2 1 19 8 5 5 6 12 1

Table IV. Ratio of female authors to the total number of authors in articles

female fraction by the number of articles in that category. For example, there are 12 articles in the category of 1/6 female fraction, which means that womens fractional contribution is only 2 articles out of 12 (1/6 12 2). The sum of the fractional contributions for women is 147 articles, which is 6 per cent of all articles. The remaining 94 per cent of the contribution was made by men (Figure 1). We used article per author share as a measure of productivity at the individual level. If we divide 147 articles by the number of female authors (435), the result will be 0.34 articles per female author. The same gure for male authors (2479/4093) is 0.60 articles per male author. This indicates that the productivity of males at the individual level was almost twice that of females. Table V breaks down the articles by their general subject categories. The highest number of articles belonged to chemistry and chemical engineering (888 articles) and then to medicine (513 articles). The highest rate of female contribution in articles belonged to environmental studies as 34 per cent of them had female authors. However, it should be noted that there were only three articles published in this subject category. Apart from environmental studies, females had a considerable rate of contribution in articles published in nutrition (30 per cent), medicine (25 per cent), biology (22 per cent), and chemistry and chemical engineering (15 per cent). The lowest rate of female contribution belonged to computer sciences where there were no female authors at all. The low number of women in computer sciences seems to be common in western countries as well (Bjorkman et al., 1998). Computer sciences were followed by agriculture, physics, metallurgy, engineering, and geology where female authors contributed in 3, 4, 5, 6 and 6 per cent of the articles, respectively. These ndings are somewhat in line with the ndings of Webster (2001) and Lewison (2001). Using the data presented in Table IV, a line diagram (Figure 2) was generated that illustrates the contribution of male and female authors in each subject category. The data were sorted so the subjects in which females had more contributions are presented at the right end of the lines. As explained before, the diagram also shows that in subjects such as environmental studies, nutrition, medicine, ecology and chemistry women are closing the gap in their contribution to publications compared with their

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Figure 1. Contribution of male and female authors in articles published in 2003

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Subject Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Medicine Engineering (various) Physics Mathematics Metallurgy Biology Agriculture Geology Educational Sciences Computer Sciences Veterinary Medicine Humanities Nutrition Environmental Studies Other Total

Articles with female contribution No Per cent 130 128 19 7 11 5 20 2 3 3 0 2 1 3 1 17 352 15 25 6 4 10 5 22 3 6 7 0 7 8 30 34 12 13.4

Articles solely written by male authors No Per cent 758 385 326 203 97 90 70 62 41 41 31 25 11 7 2 125 2274 85 75 94 96 90 95 78 97 93 93 100 93 92 70 66 88 86.6

Total 888 513 345 210 108 95 90 64 44 44 31 27 12 10 3 142 2626

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Table V. Gender distribution of articles published by Iranian authors by subject category

Figure 2. Comparison of male and female productivity in different subjects

male fellows, while publications in subjects such as computer sciences, agriculture, physics, metallurgy, engineering and geology are very male dominated. The articles in the dataset were also examined to nd out about patterns of international collaboration among Iranian male and female scholars. As Figure 3 demonstrates, women collaborated with international (non-Iranian) authors in 30 articles from their total of 352 articles. This means that 8.5 per cent of their articles involved international collaboration, while this gure for men was 19 per cent.

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Figure 3. International collaboration of Iranian authors

Discussion and conclusions The study shows that Iranian women appear to be less active in exact sciences such as physics and mathematics and more active in certain areas of life sciences such as medicine and biology. They are also less likely than men to collaborate with non-Iranian authors. Women contributed in 13.4 per cent (352 from the total of 2,626) of the articles published by Iranian scholars in 2003 and in this contribution they only accounted for 0.34 of the contributing authors. At the individual level, the productivity of male authors was higher (0.60 articles per male author) than that of female authors (0.34 articles per female author). Collectively, the overall productivity of males was also higher than that of females as men accounted for 94 per cent and women accounted for only 6 per cent of the articles published in 2003. In the academic year 2002-2003 there were 40,054 faculty members in Irans higher education[5] of which 6,598 (16.45 per cent) were female (Ghiasi, 2003, p. 133). Although these gures do not cover graduate students and the private research sector, we can rightly assume that they show the relative proportion of gender distribution in Irans research as the research in Iran is mainly done in academic institutions. Therefore, one would expect women to have about a 16.5 per cent share in the authorship of Iranian articles. A chi-squared test (x 2 7.94, df 1, p , 0.01) showed that the difference between male and female productivity is signicant at the 1 per cent level. Womens contribution is much lower than expected. However, one needs to take into account the context in which Iranian women make their contribution. Women accounted for slightly less than a sixth of the academics in Iran at the time of the study, which means they were in a low minority and this could have had an impact on their productivity. Moreover, the general productivity of academic women seems to be lower than their male peers worldwide, even in the developed counties with high GDI where issues such as gender discrimination are less signicant and women face fewer difculties and barriers in their career compared to those in a developing country.

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It has to be said that this study was limited just to one publication year and it is necessary to conduct a research with a wider timeframe to obtain a clearer picture of womens contribution in scientic production. It must also be noted that the data presented in the study were for 2003 and things might have changed during the last few years. As the number of female students has increased during the last decade one would expect some positive changes in the contribution of Iranian women in science. This needs to be investigated in a follow up study. The study also highlights the need for further qualitative studies in order to investigate the reasons for the lower contribution of women in scientic production compared to men. Comparing the factors that underpin the productivity puzzle in an Islamic developing country with those in developed countries might provide some greater insights.
Notes 1. For instance, the UK Resource Centre (UKRC) for women in Science, Engineering and Technology (SET) was established in 2004 to deliver a substantial part of the British Governments strategy for women in SET. For more information visit www.ukrc4setwomen. org.uk 2. GDI is an indication of the standard of living in a country, developed by the United Nations. It aims to show the inequalities between men and women in the following areas: long and healthy life, knowledge, and a decent standard of living (Wikipedia, 2008). 3. The top ve countries with the highest GDI are Iceland, Norway, Australia, Canada and Ireland. 4. Fortunately, ISI has recently added this feature to its Web of Science. Although the search in ISI is still based on the surnames and the initial letters of the forenames, a new eld has been added to the full record which shows the full name of the authors in the case of the majority of authors. 5. This gure excludes the educational staff and part-timers and only covers the state-run section of higher education. The total gure for 2002-2003 (just for the state-run section) was 67,775 of which 12,413 (18.31 per cent) were female.

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