PUBBLICAZIONE/PUBLICATION

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  • Item type:Publication,
    Gender and equality at top economics journals
    (2020)
    Hengel, Erin
    ;
    Moon, Eunyoung
    Using (asinh) citations as a proxy for quality, we show that female-authored papers published in top economics journals are, on average, higher quality than male-authored papers. Furthermore, men and women publish higher quality papers when they co-author with women instead of men—for example, the same senior male economist receives about 60 log points more citations when he co-authors with a junior woman as opposed to a junior man. Finally, variance in quality is consistently higher among published male-authored papers. Under strong—but we believe reasonable—distributional assumptions, we show that these findings imply top economics journals hold female-authored papers to higher standards and, as a result, do not publish the highest quality research.
  • Item type:Publication,
    Are Women Held to Higher Standards? Evidence from Peer Review* Open PDF 
    (2022)
    Hengel, Erin
    Female authors are underrepresented in top economics journals. In this paper, I investigate whether higher writing standards contribute to the problem. I find: (i) female-authored papers are 1–6 percent better written than equivalent papers by men; (ii) the gap widens during peer review; (iii) women improve their writing as they publish more papers (but men do not); (iv) female-authored papers take longer under review. Using a subjective expected utility framework, I argue that higher writing standards for women are consistent with these stylised facts. A counterfactual analysis suggests senior female economists may, as a result, write at least five percent more clearly than they otherwise would. As a final exercise, I show tentative evidence that women adapt to biased treatment in ways that may disguise it as voluntary choice.
  • Item type:Publication,
    Gender issues in fundamental physics: Strumia’s bibliometric analysis fails to account for key confounders and confuses correlation with causation Open PDF 
    (2021)
    Ball, Philip
    ;
    Britton, T. Benjamin
    ;
    Hengel, Erin
    ;
    Moriarty, Philip
    ;
    Oliver, Rachel A.
    Alessandro Strumia recently published a survey of gender differences in publications and citations in high-energy physics (HEP). In addition to providing full access to the data, code, and methodology, Strumia (2021) systematically describes and accounts for gender differences in HEP citation networks. His analysis points both to ongoing difficulties in attracting women to HEP and an encouraging—though slow—trend in improvement. Unfortunately, however, the time and effort that Strumia (2021) devoted to collating and quantifying the data are not matched by a similar rigor in interpreting the results. To support his conclusions, he selectively cites available literature and fails to adequately adjust for a range of confounding factors. For example, his analyses do not consider how unobserved factors—for example, a tendency to overcite well-known authors—drive a wedge between quality and citations and correlate with author gender. He also fails to take into account many structural and nonstructural factors—including, but not limited to, direct discrimination and the expectations that women form (and actions they take) in response to it—that undoubtedly lead to gender differences in productivity. We therefore believe that a number of Strumia’s conclusions are not supported by his analysis. Indeed, we reanalyze a subsample of solo-authored papers from his data, adjusting for year and journal of publication, authors’ research age and their lifetime “fame.” Our reanalysis suggests that female-authored papers are actually cited more than male-authored papers. This finding is inconsistent with the “greater male variability” hypothesis that Strumia (2021) proposes to explain many of his results. In the conclusion to his paper, Strumia states that “… dealing with complex systems, any simple interpretation can easily be incomplete …”. We agree entirely. Strumia’s simple—and, more importantly, simplistic—analysis and interpretation are far from complete.