Mirror on the Field: Gender, Authorship, and Research Methods in Higher Education’s Leading Journals

ABSTRACT

Framed conceptually by gender equity, gender homophily, the contest regime of blind peer-review publishing, and the gendered nature of the quantitative–qualitative debate, this study investigated the intersection of authorship, gender, and methodological characteristics of 408 articles published from 2006 to 2010 in 3 major higher education journals. Nonbinary coding of author gender based on pronouns identified via Web searches virtually eliminated missing data and likely reduced error. Results suggest movement toward gender parity over time; however, women’s representation among authors does not appear commensurate with representation in the field. Findings revealed gendered use of research methods, with qualitative articles more likely to be first-authored by women and quantitative articles more likely to be first-authored by men. Nevertheless, articles first-authored by both women and men were more likely to use quantitative than qualitative methods. Quantitative research, more so than qualitative research, appears to be a site of cogender collaboration, which has increased over time. This portrait of the intersection of authorship, gender, and research methods provides an empirical foundation for discussion and inquiry about gender and scholarship in the field, and the results of our study are generative for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Authorship
• content analysis
• gender
• higher education research
• research methods

Notes

1. In the studies reviewed here, researchers coded and analyzed data based on authors’ sex (typically inferred via first name) rather than gender. Throughout this literature review, we refer to “sex” only when the original article used that term. This referencing does not indicate a conceptual conflating of sex and gender on our part.