  This paper seeks to build upon the previous literature on gender aspects in
research collaboration and knowledge diffusion. Our approach adds the meme
inheritance notion to traditional citation analysis, as we investigate if
scientific memes are inherited differently from gendered authorship. Since
authors of scientific papers inherit knowledge from their cited authors, once
authorship is gendered we are able to characterize the inheritance process with
respect to the frequencies of memes and their propagation scores depending on
the gender of the authors. By applying methodologies that enable the gender
disambiguation of authors, big missing data on the gender of citing and cited
authors is dealt with. Our empirically based approach allows for investigating
the combined effect of meme inheritance and gendered transmission. Results show
that scientific memes do not spread differently from either male or female
cited authors. Likewise, the memes that we analyse were not found to propagate
more easily via male or female inheritance.
