Gender Inequalities in the Chilean Education Academia: How Academic Factors and Family Formation Moderates Research Output and Co-authorship Networks

Despite greater female participation in higher education, gender imbalances persist in research output and career paths (UNESCO & IESALC, 2021).

Research on gender gaps has focused on science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields, where female underrepresentation is more pronounced (Kriesi & Imdorf, 2019).

Conversely, gender disparities in disciplines with high female participation, like education, receive less attention, possibly due to the belief that women's participation in undergraduate programs equates to gender equality in their academic careers.

Female researchers in feminised fields not only face discrimination but also disparities in wages and funding, detrimentally impacting their productivity and career progression (Shen, 2013; Vinokurova, 2015).

Structural gender inequities in these fields persistently affect academic life courses across disciplines and positions (Silander et al., 2013).

Women disproportionately engage in teaching (Belluigi et al., 2023) and service roles (Guarino & Borden, 2017; Hanasono et al., 2019), as well as handle more domestic responsibilities (Cervia & Biancheri, 2017; Fusulier et al., 2017).

This imbalance exacerbates gender disparities in research output, leadership, and collaboration, leading to inequities in academic promotions and salaries (Abramo et al., 2021; Buquet et al., 2013; Jacobs & Winslow, 2004; Winslow & Davis, 2016).

Consequently, analysing academic careers through a gender lens with longitudinal methods is essential to capture these trends (Selva et al., 2011; Winslow & Davis, 2016).

This project aims to explore gender inequalities in research output and collaborative networks within Chilean education academia.

Two studies are proposed: 1) the first will focus on how family formation (i.e. marital status, parental leave and number of children), academic age, university prestige and journal prestige influence researchers' productivity over their career trajectories; and 2) the second study will explore their co-authorship networks, seeking to uncover patterns of gender homophily and the moderating role of academic age, university and journal prestige on co-authorship networks.

An observational, longitudinal and quantitative design is proposed to depict the Chilean education academia.

Multilevel Poisson models will be estimated to model research output by considering the nested structure of data, where researchers at the individual level belong to a university at the group level.

Stochastic actor-oriented models (SAOM), a family of statistical models for analysing longitudinal social networks, will be applied to model co-authorship network dynamics.

SAOM models estimate the probability of having a co-authorship based on actor attributes (e.g., gender, academic age), dyad attributes (e.g. same gender dyad), and network structure (e.g. triads) over time.