Differences between men and women have intrigued generations of social scientists, who have found that the two sexes behave differently in settings requiring competition, risk taking, altruism, honesty, as well as many others. Yet, little is known about whether there are gender differences in cooperative behavior. Previous evidence is mixed and inconclusive. Here I shed light on this topic by analyzing the totality of studies that my research group has conducted since 2013. This is a dataset of 10,951 observations coming from 7,322 men and women living in the US, recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk, and who passed four comprehension questions to make sure they understand the cooperation problem (a one-shot prisoner's dilemma). The analysis demonstrates that women are more cooperative than men. The effect size is small (about 4 percentage points, and this might explain why previous studies failed to detect it) but highly significant (p<.0001).
Previous research shows that women are more altruist than men in dictator game experiments. Yet, little is known whether women are expected to be more altruist than men. Here we elicit third-parties' beliefs about dictators' donations conditional on knowing the gender of the dictator. Our data provide evidence of three main findings: (i) women are expected to be more altruist than men; (ii) both men and women have correct beliefs about the level of altruism among men; and (iii) both men and women overestimate the level of altruism among women. In doing so, our results uncover a perception gap …
Previous experiments have explored the effects of gender and cognitive reflection on dishonesty separately. To the best of our knowledge, no studies have investigated potential interactions between these two factors. Exploring this interaction is important because previous work found that males tend to be both more deliberative than females. Therefore, it is possible that the gender effect on dishonesty is moderated by cognitive reflection. Here we report a large online experiment (N = 766) where subjects first have a chance to lie for their benefit and then take a Cognitive Reflection Test (C…
The attrition of women in academic careers is a major concern, particularly in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics subjects. One factor that can contribute to the attrition is the lack of visible role models for women in academia. At early career stages, the behaviour of the local community may play a formative role in identifying ingroup role models, shaping women's impressions of whether or not they can be successful in academia. One common and formative setting to observe role models is the local departmental academic seminar, talk, or presentation. We thus quantified women's …
Gender inequality starts before birth. Parents tend to prefer boys over girls, which is manifested in reproductive behavior, marital life, and parents' pastimes and investments in their children. While social media and sharing information about children (so-called "sharenting") have become an integral part of parenthood, it is not well-known if and how gender preference shapes online behavior of users. In this paper, we investigate public mentions of daughters and sons on social media. We use data from a popular social networking site on public posts from 635,665 users. We find that both men a…
The Stable Marriage Problem is to find a one-to-one matching for two equally sized sets of agents. Due to its widespread applications in the real world, especially the unique importance to the centralized match maker, a very large number of questions have been extensively studied in this field. This article considers a generalized form of stable marriage problem, where different numbers of men and women need to be matched pairwise and the emergence of single is inevitable. Theoretical analysis and numerical simulations confirm that even small deviations from equal number of two sides can have …
How common is self-citation in scholarly publication, and does the practice vary by gender? Using novel methods and a data set of 1.5 million research papers in the scholarly database JSTOR published between 1779 and 2011, the authors find that nearly 10 percent of references are self-citations by a paper's authors. The findings also show that between 1779 and 2011, men cited their own papers 56 percent more than did women. In the last two decades of data, men self-cited 70 percent more than women. Women are also more than 10 percentage points more likely than men to not cite their own previou…
Mounting evidence suggests that publications and citations of scholars in the STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) suffer from gender biases. In this paper, we study the physics community, a core STEM field in which women are still largely underrepresented and where these gender disparities persist. To reveal such inequalities, we compare the citations received by papers led by men and women that cover the same topics in a comparable way. To do that, we devise a robust statistical measure of similarity between publications that enables us to detect pairs of similar pa…
Harder, shorter, sharper, forward: A comparison of women's and men's elite football gameplay (2020-2025)
Roslin Institute, University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学罗斯林研究所）；NPLab, Network Science Institute, Northeastern University London（伦敦东北大学网络科学研究所）；Instituto de Física Interdisciplinar y Sistemas Complejos IFISC, Campus UIB（巴利阿里岛大学校区跨学科物理与复杂系统研究所）；Department of Science, Technology and Society, Scuola Universitaria Superiore IUSS Pavia（帕维亚高等大学科学与技术系）；Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics, University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学生物多样性与生态系统动力学研究所）；Universitat Pompeu Fabra（庞培法布拉大学）；Department of Computer Science, Reykjavík University（雷克雅未克大学计算机系）；Complex Systems Group, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos（雷乌维尔胡安卡洛斯大学复杂系统组）；Information Engineering and Computer Science Department, University of Trento（特伦托大学信息与计算机科学系）；Network Science Institute, Northeastern University（东北大学网络科学研究所）；Department of Physics, Northeastern University（东北大学物理系）；Institute for Experiential AI, Northeastern University（东北大学体验式人工智能研究所）
Now that various countries are or will soon be moving towards relaxing shelter-in-place rules, it is important that people use a face covering, to avoid an exponential resurgence of the spreading of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Here we report a pre-registered online experiment (N=2,459) using a heterogenous, although not representative, sample of people living in the USA, where we test the relative effect of messages highlighting that the coronavirus is a threat to "you" vs "your family" vs "your community" vs "your country" on self-reported intentions to wear a face covering. Results s…
Superpositions of social networks, such as communication, friendship, or trade networks, are called multiplex networks, forming the structural backbone of human societies. Novel datasets now allow quantification and exploration of multiplex networks. Here we study gender-specific differences of a multiplex network from a complete behavioral dataset of an online-game society of about 300,000 players. On the individual level females perform better economically and are less risk-taking than males. Males reciprocate friendship requests from females faster than vice versa and hesitate to reciprocat…
Behavioral gender differences are known to exist for a wide range of human activities including the way people communicate, move, provision themselves, or organize leisure activities. Using mobile phone data from 1.2 million devices in Austria (15% of the population) across the first phase of the COVID-19 crisis, we quantify gender-specific patterns of communication intensity, mobility, and circadian rhythms. We show the resilience of behavioral patterns with respect to the shock imposed by a strict nation-wide lock-down that Austria experienced in the beginning of the crisis with severe impli…
Gender differences in research productivity are well documented, and have been mostly explained by access parental leave and child-related responsibilities. Those explanations are based on the assumption that women take on the majority of childcare responsibilities, and take the same level of leave at the birth of a child. Changing social dynamics around parenting has seen fathers increasingly take an active role in parenting. This demands a more nuanced approach to understanding how parenting affects both men and women. Using a global survey of 11,226 academic parents, this study investigates…
The historical and contemporary under-attribution of women's contributions to scientific scholarship is well-known and well-studied, with effects that are felt today in myriad ways by women scientists. One measure of this under-attribution is the so-called citation gap between men and women: the under-citation of papers authored by women relative to expected rates coupled with a corresponding over-citation of papers authored by men relative to expected rates. We explore the citation gap in contemporary physics, analyzing over one million articles published over the last 25 years in 35 physics …
I analyze the postdoctoral career tracks of a nearly-complete sample of astronomers from 28 United States graduate astronomy and astrophysics programs spanning 13 graduating years (N=1063). A majority of both men and women (65% and 66%, respectively) find long-term employment in astronomy or closely-related academic disciplines. No significant difference is observed in the rates at which men and women are hired into these jobs following their PhDs, or in the rates at which they leave the field. Applying a two-outcome survival analysis model to the entire data set, the relative academic hiring …
One of the defining representations of women from medieval times is in the role of peace-weaver, that is, a woman was expected to 'weave' peace between warring men. The underlying assumption in scholarship on this topic is that female mediation lessens male violence. This stance can however be questioned since it may be the result of gender-based peace and diplomacy models that relegate women's roles to that of conduits between men. By analyzing the concept of communicability and relevance of certain nodes in complex networks we show how our sources afford women more complex and nuanced social…
The use of public transportation or simply moving about in streets are gendered issues. Women and girls often engage in multi-purpose, multi-stop trips in order to do household chores, work, and study ('trip chaining'). Women-headed households are often more prominent in urban settings and they tend to work more in low-paid/informal jobs than men, with limited access to transportation subsidies. Here we present recent results on urban mobility from a gendered perspective by uniquely combining a wide range of datasets, including commercial sources of telecom and open data. We explored urban mob…
