Abstract

In spite of various improvements and increasing involvement of female researchers in scientific
activities in recent years, the gender gap still persists and women remain greatly
underrepresented in technology, engineering, and computer science fields. This thesis attempts
to shed some light on the effect of gender and funding on research output of Canadian
researchers in natural sciences and engineering. In this research, using NSERC and Scopus
data from 1982 to 2018, we apply descriptive statistical analysis and regression analysis to
study the influence of funding and gender on the quantity of published journal papers and their
scientific impact. The study concludes that funding has a positive impact on both the number
of papers published and the number of citations received by their respective author. However,
we also observe that as career age of authors increases, researchers become less productive,
they publish less papers and their citation counts slightly diminish with time as well, even
though their funding amounts typically increase. In terms of gender, even though we find that
female researchers are indeed greatly underrepresented and receive lower amounts of funding
than their male counterparts, they produce on average similar number of articles with similar
scientific impact. This means that female researchers can generate comparable research output
with lower research costs compared to male researchers and are thus more efficient in their
research production. These findings suggest that governmental funding agencies should
introduce more effective gender-related funding strategies and greater support for early-career
researchers.