This essay presents the first analysis of gender differences in productivity using panel data on scientists in low-income countries. About 540 researchers in Ghana, Kenya, and Kerala were studied using the same survey instrument in 2001 and 2005. Results indicate very few gender disparities in outcomes at either period of the study with one exception: productivity in international journals. The authors show that substantial gains in access to technology and higher education by women have not reduced the gender gap on (...) this important career dimension. (shrink)

Although the STS literature on boundary-work recognizes that such work unfolds within a “terrain of uneven advantage” vis-à-vis gender, race, and other inequalities, reflection about that uneven advantage has been strikingly underdeveloped. This article calls for a retheorizing of boundary-work that engages more actively with feminist, critical race, and postcolonial scholarship and examines more systematically the relation between scientific boundary-work, broader structures of sociopolitical inequality, and boundary-workers’ positionality. To demonstrate the need for this retheorization, I analyze ethnographic and interview data (...) on scientific boundary-work in the natural and social sciences in Portugal, showing that scholars’ gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and nationality affect the success of their boundary-work. I suggest, therefore, that in unequal societies where credibility is unevenly distributed, the conditions are not in place for some scholars’ boundary-work to work. I draw on Sara Ahmed to argue that we must conceptualize scientific boundary-work as always potentially performative, but not always successfully so, and explicitly interrogate the actual conditions of performativity. Recognizing the links between inequality, embodiment, and non-performativity in scientific boundary-work will enable STS to better understand, and hopefully transform, the relations between contingent struggles over scientificity and entrenched structures of power. (shrink)

Coauthored scholarship increased substantially across fields of science during the twentieth century, but it is unclear whether this growth reflects change in the behavior of individual scientists or publishing differences between cohorts of researchers. I examine the publication records of an interdisciplinary sample of university scientists and find evidence of both career-aging and cohort-succession processes, although cohort differences are much more pronounced than individual changes. Specifically, scientists in this sample increased the percentage of their articles with coauthors by 0.63 percentage (...) points annually. However, compared to those who received their PhDs between 1953 and 1962, scientists who entered the workforce between 1983 and 1991 coauthored approximately one third more of their early career articles. Additionally, career-aging processes in coauthorship varied by PhD cohort, with earlier trained researchers increasing more rapidly. Overall, this article highlights cohort succession as a source of change in coauthorship, and underscores the importance of accounting for generational differences in studies of scientific careers. (shrink)