Looking Beyond Representation: Gender Inequities in Research Attrition, Output, Leadership, and Collaboration in Chilean Education Researchers’ Career Trajectories

Despite a more favorable representation of women in highly feminized academic fields, such as education, gender disparities manifest themselves across different dimensions of faculty work and unfold over the course of research careers. In this study, we focus on the role of gender in shaping the careers of Chilean education researchers. Using survival, Poisson regression, and social network analyses, we examined gendered patterns of attrition, research output, first authorship, and coauthorship across researchers’ career trajectories. Bibliometric data were analyzed for the 5, 702 authors who published articles in Scopus-indexed education journals between 2011 and 2021 while affiliated with a Chilean institution. Our results show that, despite similar initial representation, being a female researcher increases attrition hazard by 21.5%, with women at the beginning of their research career being particularly at risk of attrition. We also found a significant gender gap in the number of articles published, with Chilean female education researchers publishing, on average, 20.8% fewer articles than male researchers, a disparity that increases in magnitude with years of research experience. However, there were no significant gender differences in research leadership (i.e., first authorships). In relation to collaboration profiles, female researchers showed significantly fewer coauthorships and were more likely to engage in national collaborations when compared to male researchers, who tended to develop more international (both regional and nonregional) collaboration profiles. Furthermore, coauthorship patterns showed significant levels of gender and research experience homophily. Possible explanations pertaining to structural barriers faced by female researchers and policy implications are discussed.