Lacunas de gênero entre as grandes áreas do conhecimento na ciência baiana: uma abordagem das diferenças nas escolhas competitivas

Abstract

This work aims to identify gender gaps in Bahia science resulting from a lower propensity of women to compete. Different from traditional scientometric indicators, in this study we use the research projects submitted and approved in the public call for the promotion of science and technology of the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado da Bahia (the State Agency for Research Support) as the indicators of science production, the most suitable indicator for to study gender inequality in science from the perspective of competition. The analysis is carried out by comparing the proportion between submission and approval of projects in the different cutouts of public call and observing possible gender gap arising from a low rate of submission of proposals by women in more competitive notices. A second line of investigation seeks to verify whether the performance of women presented in the aggregated data is reproduced in each large area of knowledge, or whether research fields with a marked male predominance and other fields with a strong female predominance persist. The study goes on to verify whether gender inequalities are reproduced in the valorization of scientific production, identifying the proportion of researchers with research productivity scholarship from the CNPq (PQ). The main conclusions point to the existence of gender gaps in Bahia science resulting from a lower probability of women to self-select (opt-in) to compete.