Women scientists in knowledge exchanges with nonacademic actors: participation gap and emerging gender patterns

ABSTRACT

This paper examines women scientists’ participation in Knowledge Exchange (KE) with nonacademic actors. We compare three KE types –informal engagement, formal engagement and commercialization– and find significant differences in participation depending on type. In informal engagement, women and men participate equally, but women participate less than men in both formal engagement and commercialization. We explore whether academic rank and women peers influence this participation gap. We find evidence of a levelling effect related to academic rank in the case of formal engagement and an emulating effect related to women peers in the case of commercialization. The implications of the emerging gender patterns are also discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Women scientists
• knowledge exchange
• nonacademic actors
• participation gap
• gender

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In recent years, gender equity in research and innovation policies has been promoted in Spain through new regulation and specific government working programmes, leading to some positive trends (Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation 2021), which make this context suitable and interesting for the analysis.

2 Table A1 in the supplemental material provides details response rates by discipline.

3 See Table A3 in the supplemental material.

4 See Table A4 in the supplemental material for the correlation matrix for the variables used in the analysis.

5 We used the Stata-mvprobit command.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness [grant number CSO2013-48053-R].