Women’s Resilience in the Time of Covid-19

Worldwide spreading of the Covid-19 disease has produced serious consequences in terms of the number of victims and the economic and social impact of restrictions adopted by governments as countermeasures. Among the affected sectors, research has recorded a drop in scientific production, although mitigated by the diffusion of digital platforms for smart working and collaboration. Resilience is the capacity or ability to adapt, recover, and bounce back from challenges, setbacks, or adversity. In this paper, we adopted a quantitative approach based on semantic techniques and complex network analysis to investigate how the Italian community of information systems has reacted to the pandemic and how resilient its members of different genders have been. Specifically, we collected and analyzed the scientific papers of the itAIS conference from 2007 to 2022, studying the performance of female and male researchers before and after the event. Finally, we compared the results to draw conclusions related to the level of resilience of information system researchers during the pandemic. In detail, we observed that females have been more resilient to Covid-19 than males, as their authority decreased less.