Gender-based homophily in collaborations across a heterogeneous scholarly landscape

The tendency to associate with individuals of the same gender creates profound divisions within professional and social contexts. We investigate this tendency within scientific co-authorships using the JSTOR corpus of articles. We distinguish three components of gender homophily in collaborations: a structural component that is due to demographics and non-gendered authorship norms of a scientific community, a compositional component which is driven by varying gender representation across sub-disciplines, and a behavioral component which we define as the remainder of observed homophily after its structural and compositional components have been taken into account. We find that significant behavioral homophily can be detected across the JSTOR corpus and show that this finding is robust to missing gender indicators in our data. In a secondary analysis, we show that the proportion of female representation in a field is positively associated with significant behavioral homophily.