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  • Item type:Publication,
    Author-Reviewer Homophily in Peer Review
    (bioRxiv, 2019)
    Murray, Dakota
    ;
    Siler, Kyle
    ;
    Larivière, Vincent
    ;
    Chan, Wei Mun
    ;
    Collings, Andrew M.
    The fairness of scholarly peer review has been challenged by evidence of disparities in publication outcomes based on author demographic characteristics. To assess this, we conducted an exploratory analysis of peer review outcomes of 23,876 initial submissions and 7,192 full submissions that were submitted to the biosciences journal eLife between 2012 and 2017. Women and authors from nations outside of North America and Europe were underrepresented both as gatekeepers (editors and peer reviewers) and authors. We found evidence of a homophilic relationship between the demographics of the gatekeepers and authors and the outcome of peer review; that is, there were higher rates of acceptance in the case of gender and country homophily. The acceptance rate for manuscripts with male last authors was seven percent, or 3.5 percentage points, greater than for female last authors (95% CI = [0.5, 6.4]); this gender inequity was greatest, at nine percent or about 4.8 percentage points (95% CI = [0.3, 9.1]), when the team of reviewers was all male; this difference was smaller and not significantly different for mixed-gender reviewer teams. Homogeny between countries of the gatekeeper and the corresponding author was also associated with higher acceptance rates for many countries. To test for the persistence of these effects after controlling for potentially confounding variables, we conducted a logistic regression including document and author metadata. Disparities in acceptance rates associated with gender and country of affiliation and the homophilic associations remained. We conclude with a discussion of mechanisms that could contribute to this effect, directions for future research, and policy implications. Code and anonymized data have been made available at https://github.com/murrayds/elife-analysis Author summary Peer review, the primary method by which scientific work is evaluated, is ideally a fair and equitable process in which scientific work is judged solely on its own merit. However, the integrity of peer review has been called into question based on evidence that outcomes often differ between male and female authors, and for authors in different countries. We investigated such disparities at the biosciences journal eLife by analyzing the demographics of authors and gatekeepers (editors and peer reviewers), and peer review outcomes of all submissions between 2012 and 2017. Outcomes were more favorable for male authors and those affiliated with institutions in North America and Europe; these groups were also over-represented among gatekeepers. There was evidence that peer review outcomes were influenced by homophily —a preference of gatekeepers for manuscripts from authors with shared characteristics. We discuss mechanisms that could contribute to this effect, directions for future research, and policy implications.
  • Item type:Publication,
    Underrepresentation of Women in Undergraduate Economics Degrees in Europe: A Comparison with STEM and Business
    (Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), 2021)
    Megalokonomou, Rigissa
    ;
    Vidal-Fernandez, Marian
    ;
    Yengin, Duygu
    In the last decade, the proportion and academic performance of women who pursue university degrees has increased relative to men in a range of developing countries (OECD, 2015). Nonetheless, the percentage of undergraduate economics degrees awarded to women has remained between 30% and 35% during 2001-2018 in the U.S. (Siegfried, 2019). In a recent work by Lundberg and Stearns (2019), they show that the gender gap worsens as women economists progress in their professional careers in the U.S., where they end up representing only 10% of university professors. European countries seem to have less of a "leaky pipeline," where the same figure sits at 22% (Auriol, Friebel, and Wilhelm, 2020). To put this figure into perspective, our paper describes the cross-country underrepresentation of women graduating in economics degrees in Europe relative to their country-specific women/men university graduation rates. Second, we compare the underrepresentation of women in economics to its closest alternative namely business, as well as its gender underrepresented counterpart, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). Finally, we lean on recent evidence to suggest policies to increase the relative share of women pursuing undergraduate economics degrees in Europe with a strong focus on policies aimed at high schools. Overall, we find that, over the period 2013-2018, the underrepresentation of women in economics graduates has worsened in Europe and that on average two of every five students are women. While the gender representation of university graduates in STEM is worse than in economics, it has experienced a mild increase over the period of study. Unlike Economics, its closest alternative, business, has a slight women overrepresentation, with 1.1 women graduating for every man.
  • Item type:Publication,
    What determines the gender pay gap in Academia?
    (Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, University of Tartu (Estonia), 2024)
    Masso, Jaan
    ;
    Roosaar, Liis
    ;
    Paas, Tiiu
    ;
    Meriküll, Jaanika
    ;
    Rõigas, Kärt
    This paper focuses on two mechanisms that could explain the persistence of the gender pay gap – child penalty and bargaining. We concentrate on academia and use administrative data from the University of Tartu, the largest university in Estonia. The context of the academic sector allows us to control for worker productivity through indicators of research and teaching activities. Administrative data on academic staff from 2012 to 2021 has been linked with the population register and web-scraped data from SCOPUS. We follow the quasi-experimental approach proposed by Kleven et al. (2019a) to identify child penalty and derive outside option wages for all the detailed institutes to estimate the role of bargaining. Despite no penalty in hourly wages, the decrease in the working hours for mothers equals two years of full-time work spread over four years after childbirth. Compared to the penalty for the whole population, the child penalty in academia is shorter-lived, and no statistically significant effect on women's publications or citations was found. Men, in contrast, do not experience any penalties related to children. Women's worse bargaining skills seem to be an important factor behind the gender pay gap in academia, whereas the institute's higher outside option wage is related to relatively higher wages for men and is a less important factor for the wages of women.
  • Item type:Publication,
    Women in Economics: Stalled Progress
    (Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), 2018)
    Lundberg, Shelly
    ;
    Stearns, Jenna
    In this paper, we first document trends in the gender composition of academic economists over the past 25 years, the extent to which these trends encompass the most elite departments, and how women's representation across fields of study within economics has changed. We then review the recent literature on other dimensions of women's relative position in the discipline, including research productivity and income, and assess evidence on the barriers that female economists face in publishing, promotion, and tenure. While underlying gender differences can directly affect the relative productivity of men and women, due to either differential constraints or preferences, productivity gaps do not fully explain the gender disparity in promotion rates in economics. Furthermore, the progress of women has stalled relative to that in other disciplines in the past two decades. We propose that differential assessment of men and women is one important factor in explaining this stalled progress, reflected in gendered institutional policies and apparent implicit bias in promotion and editorial review processes.
  • Item type:Publication,
    Streamlining for excellence discriminates against women: A study of research productivity of 2.7 mln scientists in 45 countries
    (Center for Open Science, 2022)
    Letki, Natalia
    ;
    Biały, Grzegorz
    ;
    Sankowski, Piotr
    ;
    Walentek, Dawid
    Gender inequality in academia is well documented yet persistently difficult to eradicate. Here, we adopt a new perspective by investigating the effect of institutional design on gender gap in research productivity on the example of habilitation - a centralized performance assessment procedure. Using a new, population-based dataset comprising 2,704,688 researchers from 45 countries we show that the presence of a habilitation has unexpected gendering counter-effect on research productivity, as it systematically lowers performance of female, but not male researchers. We also show that while international mobility improves research productivity of both genders in both systems, in systems without habilitation the selection effect for mobile women is particularly strong, and their returns to mobility in terms of increased productivity are the smallest of all mobile groups. We conclude that centralised, top-down regulation of `excellence in science' causes irreparable damage to careers of female researchers.
  • Item type:Publication,
    Is Blinded Review Enough? How Gendered Outcomes Arise Even Under Anonymous Evaluation
    (National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, 2019)
    Kolev, Julian
    ;
    Fuentes-Medel, Yuly
    ;
    Murray, Fiona
    For organizations focused on scientific research and innovation, workforce diversity is a key driver of success. Blinded review is an increasingly popular approach to reducing bias and increasing diversity in the selection of people and projects, yet its effectiveness is not fully understood. We explore the impact of blinded review on gender inclusion in a unique setting: innovative research grant proposals submitted to the Gates Foundation from 2008-2017. Despite blinded review, female applicants receive significantly lower scores, which cannot be explained by reviewer characteristics, proposal topics, or ex-ante measures of applicant quality. By contrast, the gender score gap is no longer significant after controlling for text-based measures of proposals’ titles and descriptions. Specifically, we find strong gender differences in the usage of broad and narrow words, suggesting that differing communication styles are a key driver of the gender score gap. Importantly, the text-based measures that predict higher reviewer scores do not also predict higher ex-post innovative performance. Instead, female applicants exhibit a greater response in follow-on scientific output after an accepted proposal, relative to male applicants. Our results reveal that gender differences in writing and communication are a significant contributor to gender disparities in the evaluation of science and innovation.
  • 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,
    A Model of the Effects of Gender Neutral Tenure Clock Stopping Policies on the Publication Strategies of Junior Faculty
    (CESifo, 2022)
    Gugl, Elisabeth
    ;
    Amini, Moein
    ;
    Farnham, Martin
    We model the decision of a junior faculty member where to send publications at various points along the tenure track. A single paper arrives exogenously at the start of each of three periods before the tenure decision is made. The researcher has the choice of submitting each paper to either a "Top" journal or a "Regular" journal. The probability of acceptance at a top journal is lower than at a regular journal, but the reward is greater. Researchers need a minimum of 1 top publication or 2 regular publications by the end of the three periods to get tenure. We show that, under reasonable assumptions about gendered childbearing and childrearing responsibilities, introduction of a gender neutral clock stopping (GNCS) policy induces men to submit more papers to top journals, while leaving women’s submission strategies unchanged. This results in more top publications for men under a GNCS policy, while leaving women's publication records unchanged. Our model predictions are largely consistent with the empirical findings of Antecol et al. (2018). Our findings give insights into design of an important “family-friendly” university workplace policy with implications for the “leaky pipeline” in economics, whereby women are especially underrepresented at higher ranks in the discipline.
  • Item type:Publication,
    Relative Grades and Gender Differences in STEM Enrollment
    (University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany, 2025)
    Fuchs, Larissa;Pinger, Pia
    ;
    Seeger, Philipp
    Based on novel administrative and survey data from Germany, this study investigates the importance of relative STEM performance in high school for the gender gap in STEM enrollment. We first document that males display a higher relative STEM performance than females, which however mainly emerges from females' stronger achievement in non-STEM subjects. Our findings further reveal that a one-standard-deviation increase in grade-based STEM advantage raises the likelihood of pursuing a STEM degree by approximately 19 percentage points for males, but only by half as much for females. A decomposition analysis shows that 26% of the STEM gender gap could be attributed to differences in grade-based STEM performance if major preferences resembled those of males. However, relative grades are largely unimportant in an environment where preferences mirror those of females. This suggests that STEM performance differences have limited influence on females' decisions to pursue STEM degrees. While STEM advantage significantly impacts observed gender gaps in STEM enrollment, this effect is primarily driven by males.
  • Item type:Publication,
    Analysis of NIH K99/R00 Awards and the Career Progression of Awardees
    (bioRxiv, 2023)
    Woitowich, Nicole C.
    ;
    Hengel, Sarah R.
    ;
    Solis, Christopher
    ;
    Vilgalys, Tauras P.
    ;
    Babdor, Joel
    Many postdoctoral fellows and scholars who hope to secure tenure-track faculty positions in the United States apply to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for a Pathway to Independence Award. This award has two phases (K99 and R00) and provides funding for up to five years. Using NIH data for the period 2006-2022, we report that ∼230 K99 awards were made every year, representing up to ∼$250 million annual investment. About 40% of K99 awardees were women and ∼89% of K99 awardees went on to receive an R00 award annually. Institutions with the most NIH funding produced the most recipients of K99 awards and recruited the most recipients of R00 awards. The time between a researcher starting an R00 award and receiving a major NIH award (such as an R01) ranged between 4.6 and 7.4 years, and was significantly longer for women, for those who remained at their home institution, and for those hired by an institution that was not one of the 25 institutions with the most NIH funding. Shockingly, there has yet to be a K99 awardee at a historically Black college or university. We go on to show how K99 awardees flow to faculty positions, and to identify various factors that influence the future success of individual researchers and, therefore, also influence the composition of biomedical faculty at universities in the US.