Abstract

Gender homophily in research mentorship was investigated across a selection of countries and research fields over two decades by leveraging a novel tree algorithm that uncovers mentor–mentee links from genderized author profiles in Scopus. Despite a decrease in homophily for women relative to men, the overrepresentation of same-gender pairs remained much higher for women than for men in 2022. Only in fields where women were the dominant group was homophily in mentorship more pronounced for men than for women. Next, the contribution, relative to expectations, of same- and opposite-gender mentees to the tree index of their mentors was explored. This new metric quantifies the contribution of mentors to the future bibliometric performance of their mentees. Pairing with same-gender mentors was found to slightly and nearly systematically benefit the future bibliometric performance of women mentees across countries and research fields, regardless of their status as the underrepresented gender. While the positive impact on the performance of women mentees is small, the consistent pattern observed across countries and fields suggests that this is a genuine effect. The robustness of our findings across different contexts suggests that the availability of same-gender mentors is more critical for women than for men, due to women’s lower representation in most areas of science. In contrast, the bibliometric performance of men mentees only appeared to benefit from a gender match in mentorship in the few subfields in which men are underrepresented. These results underscore the importance of gender match in research mentorship networks, particularly for women mentees, as well as critical aspects of the dynamics of research mentorship networks.

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