Homophily versus gender composition.

(A) Simulation of how measurements of gender homophily are affected by the gender composition of mentor and trainee pool within a field (see Methods). Each heatmap shows simulations for a different propensity for mentors and trainees to form same-gender pairs, ranging from 0 (none) to 1 (maximum). Scatter plot shows actual mentor and trainee gender composition for data used in the homophily analysis. Each point represents average composition for one narrow research field. When mentors or trainees of one gender are scarce, homophily does not reflect the underlying propensity to form same-gender pairs. (B) Simulation, after correcting for effects of gender composition of pool, with actual average compositions overlaid, as in (A). The data and code needed to generate this figure are available on Zenodo (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4722020). (TIF)