Brazilian Authors ́ Scientific Performance: Does Gender Matter?

The number of women pursuing careers in science has recently increased remarkably. Nevertheless, they still have few chances to be successful in their careers. Low scientific performance is one of the most frequent reasons behind women’s failure in science. The present study aims at presenting evidences upon men and women ́s scientific performances. Two different databases were cross-examined to provide trends on publication and visibility (estimated by h-index) of 18,993 Brazilian authors. The results showed that the chances to be within the select group of the most productive Brazilian authors is much higher for male authors. As for those authors with 50 or less publications (90% of the sample), differences in probabilistic were not observed. Similar results were found for the h-index analysis. Regarding the relation between research field and scientific performance, we have found that research field plays an important role for male authors in terms of number of publications and h-index. However, the research field seems to have no effect upon female scientific performance. We hope the empirical evidences presented in this paper may contribute to the debate on gender differences within other scientific communities.

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