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Author: search.filters.author.Hengel, ErinViewpoints: search.filters.viewpoints.Peer Review System

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  • 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 and the time cost of peer review
    (Department of Economics, University of Sussex Business School, 2023)
    Alexander, Diane
    ;
    Gorelkina, Olga
    ;
    Hengel, Erin
    ;
    Tol, Richard S. J.
    In this paper, we investigate one factor that can directly contribute to -- as well as indirectly shed light on the other causes of -- the gender gap in academic publishing: length of peer review. Using detailed administrative data from an economics field journal, we find that, conditional on manuscript quality, referees spend longer reviewing female-authored papers, are slower to recommend accepting them, manuscripts by women go through more rounds of review and their authors spend longer revising them. Less disaggregated data from 32 economics and finance journals corroborate these results. We conclude by showing that all gender gaps decline -- and eventually disappear -- as the same referee reviews more papers. This pattern suggests novice referees initially statistically discriminate against female authors, but are less likely to do so as their information about and confidence in the peer review process improves. More generally, they also suggest that women may be particularly disadvantaged when evaluators are less familiar with the objectives and parameters of an assessment framework.