Gender diversity in the field of communication in DACH countries (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) — a scientometric analysis of the scientific job market, publications, citations, and grants

Abstract In the DACH (i.e., Germany, Austria, Switzerland) communication associations, women comprise half of the membership and can consequently express their interests in academic research, jobs, and publishing. But how does gender diversity in the DACH countries unfold across the job market, publications, citations, and grants? We present three studies to address this question. In Study 1, we observed the websites of communication departments in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland and content-analyzed the job titles of men and women working at N = 164 institutions. The data revealed that 43% of DACH professors were female. In Study 2, we ran an automatic content analysis to analyze how many publications in the DACH countries versus other countries were authored by men and women between 2000 and 2022 in 90 communication journals and whether authors from the two genders were cited proportionally. We found that women authored 53% of the articles in the 90 communication journals, whereas only 37% of the articles they authored were cited. In Study 3, we applied desktop research to analyze the diversity of grants that were awarded to DACH communication scholars. Women made up between 35% (German Research Foundation) and 43% (Swiss National Science Foundation) of principal investigators that were awarded funds by national funding organizations. We discuss the impact of current practices and suggest some new measures for increasing gender diversity by addressing issues of transparency, recognition, and inclusivity in communication.