PUBBLICAZIONE/PUBLICATION

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Author: search.filters.author.Hengel, Erin

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Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
  • 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show that these findings imply top economics journals hold female-authored papers to higher standards and, as a result, do not publish the highest quality research.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,
    A historical portrait of female economists' co-authorship networks
    (2022)
    Hengel, Erin
    ;
    Phythian-Adams, Sarah Louisa
    This paper describes how women have contributed to the research published in influential general interest journals between 1940–2019. We find that the share of women published in these journals follows a U-shaped curve that troughs in the late 1970s—a decline that is possibly related to an increase in the number of papers being published as well as a rise in co-authoring. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, the share of women began increasing again, largely thanks to a rise in mixed-gendered papers. Co-authorship between women, on the other hand, was almost non-existent until around 2010. A decade-by-decade comparison of men’s and women’s co-authorship networks suggests female–female networks in the most recent decade in our data (2010–2019) roughly resemble male networks from earlier decades (1940–1969); they also highlight the key role prominent individuals play in network formation. We hypothesise that the recent growth in papers by female teams may signal that research by women collaborating with other women is receiving greater recognition in the field.
  • Item type:Publication,
    Gender and quality at top economics journals
    (University of Liverpool, Department of Economics, 2020)
    Hengel, Erin
    ;
    Moon, Eunyoung
    Articles written by male economists are cited less than articles published by women in the same journals, a new study on gender and quality in economics finds. The authors also find that men’s citations rise when they coauthor with women, and that women’s citations fall while they co-author with men, conditional on acceptance.
  • 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.
  • 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.