The Policy Impact of Author First Name Genderednes

Bibliometric research on gender suffers from two construct validity problems. The first is ontological: as gender is typically inferred from first names and then attributed to individual authors, current research conflates two distinct entities: the name which carries the gender signal, and the person which that signal targets. The second is metrological: while first names lie on a continuous and fluid genderedness spectrum, with “Andrea” and “Leslie” being more or less feminine or masculine depending on time and place, scientometric research reduce the gender signal they carry to a crisp, binary male/female attribute. In an ongoing project, we address both issues by focusing on first names instead of authors and inferring the genderedness of each first name from the relative gender frequencies of all homonymic Wikidata human entities. Results shows that the citation distribution asymmetries occur at the extremes of the genderedness spectrum, with extremely feminine and masculine first names getting respectively the shorter and longer ed of the stick (Sainte-Marie & Larivière, 2025). The present study extends this framework to the policy domain. A recent Elsevier report (2024) counterintuitively claims that research involving women receives more policy citations than research involving men. Given the fact that these counterintuitive results are unverifiable and rest on the two abovementioned construct validity problems, we aim to provide a different perspective on the matter, by investigating how policy citations in the Overton database distribute by both author and document type over the first name genderedness spectrum.