Weihua Li

Screenshot of the top of the paper "The undervaluing of elite women in physics", Abstract: "Elite women in physics wait longer than men for recognition. Once elected to the US National Academy of Sciences, however, their prominence surges — evidence that their work was undervalued all along." Body: "Physics has changed dramatically over the past 50 years, both in the range of phenomena it studies and its demographic composition. For example, the share of publishing women physicists worldwide has more than doubled — from 4.5% in 1970 to 9.2% in 2020 — and continues to increase. Yet parity remains distant, raising the question: to what degree has the physics community progressed toward the meritocratic ideal of recognizing scientists purely on the basis of their contributions? We address this question in two ways. First, we compare broad trends in the productivity and prominence of men and women physi- cists worldwide over the past 50 years. Second, we examine the careers of elite physicists, asking whether the high honour of being elected to the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) impacts the careers of men and women in physics differently. Our analysis leverages a recently developed Bayesian network model1 to estimate individual measures of scientific productivity and prominence from large-scale bibliographic data. We apply this model to a global physics collaboration network constructed from first- and last-author pairs in 9.1 million physics journal articles (omitting single-author papers) published between 1950 and 2023 and recorded in the OpenAlex bibliographic database. Within this global network, we focus on 93,456 established physicists with at least 30 years between their first and most recent publication and with at least 10 first- or last-author publications..."

Out now in @natphys.nature.com "The undervaluing of elite women in physics", with @weihuali.bsky.social and H Zheng, we show how election into prestigious academic societies has markedly different effects on the research prominence of women and men physicists /1
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The German academic system is probably more similar to China than the US in its hierarchical structure, bureaucracy and management style. Here, research is regarded as an outcome of collective effort and central strategic planning of the institute, rather than individual inspiration and hard work.

Congrats Iain! So well deserved! Also, thank you for the mentorship and help when I was in Konstanz during Covid. Look forward to seeing you again!

"Gender and racial diversity socialization in science", a new published article by Weihua Li, Hongwei Zheng, Jennie E. Brand, and Aaron Clauset. Abstract: Scientific collaboration networks are a form of unequally distributed social capital that shapes both researcher job placement and long-term research productivity and prominence. However, the role of collaboration networks in shaping the gender and racial diversity of the scientific workforce remains unclear. Here we propose a computational null model to investigate the degree to which early-career scientific collaborators with representationally diverse cohorts of scholars are associated with forming or participating in more diverse research groups as established researchers. When testing this hypothesis using two large-scale, longitudinal datasets on scientific collaborations, we find that the gender and racial diversity in a researcher’s early-career collaboration environment is strongly associated with the diversity of their collaborators in their established period. This diversity-association effect is particularly prominent for men. Coupled with gender and racial homophily between advisors and advisees, collaborator diversity represents a generational effect that partly explains why changes in representation within the scientific workforce tend to happen very slowly.

🎉 Our new paper "Gender and racial diversity socialization in science" @natcomputsci.nature.com with @weihuali.bsky.social, H Zheng and @jenniebrand.bsky.social studies how early-career experiences with diversity drive more diverse teams later in a career 👉 /1
www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Gender and racial diversity socialization in science - Nature Computational Science A computational null model is proposed to study the gender and racial diversity-association effects in academia. Researchers’ early training in diverse environments is strongly correlated with nurturi...

📢Out now! Weihua Li, @jenniebrand.bsky.social, @aaronclauset.bsky.social, and colleagues show that researchers’ early training in diverse environments is strongly correlated with nurturing diverse groups in the established period. www.nature.com/articles/s43... #cssky #NetSci