Bibliographic Analysis of Global Studies in Women Leadership Based on Web of Science Database: A Comparison of Five Continents' Studies

The purpose of this study is the bibliographic analysis of global studies in the field of women's leadership on the Web of Science based on research from five continents and comparing them with each other. This Scientometrics study is a descriptive-analytical research using bibliometric and illustration techniques such as coword analysis and social network analysis. The research population is 3207 records in the field of women's leadership in the period 1975-2021 on the Web of Science database, which were retrieved in August 2021. Histcite, BibExcel and Excel are used to analyze the data and VOS software is used to draw maps. The results show that the Americas, Europe, Asia, Oceania and Africa contributed to 1575, 1005, 486, 227 and 172 scientific productions, respectively. The United States was the most influential country, and Stanford, Northwestern, and Harvard universities were the most productive, influential, and most cooperative, respectively. The area of business economics has had the most participation in studies. The keywords gender, leadership, and women were the most frequently used keywords in the study of continents. Coword pairs of Gender-Leadership, Leadership-Women, and Gender-Women were the most frequently used keywords pairs on five continents. In the American Studies “Gender, Women's Leadership, Performance, Organizations, and Behavior”, in the European Studies “Gender, Women, Stereotypes, Education, Employment, and Risk”, in the Asian Studies “Gender, Women, Management, Employment, Work, and Culture”, in Oceanic studies "Gender, Women, Stereotypes, Power, and Management", and in African studies “Gender, Leadership, Women, Management, Employment and Education”, were hot topics. American researchers focuse on leadership performance and behavior/women leaders in general, European researchers focuse on women leadership in education, Asian, Oceanic and African researchers focuse on women management in careers and education. Identifying hot topics paves the way for more investment in women's growth and development for leadership positions in governments and organizations.