“This paper is intentionally solo-authored,” reads the first page of a new study suggesting that, in some fields, women may receive less credit for their research than men do. The study specifically refers to papers that are co-authored between men and women and seeks to explain the gender gap between tenure rates in academia.
Heather Sarsons, a Ph.D. candidate studying economics at Harvard University, conducted the study, titled “Gender Differences in Recognition for Group Work.”
The study examined the work of economists and members of other quantitative fields from top universities and calculated the advantage of publishing a study toward being tenured. It concluded that when women work with men on a study, the women gain almost no advantage toward being promoted, whereas the men still gain benefits.
Sarsons explains this phenomenon by saying that there is an implicit bias favoring men and that women are assumed to have contributed less to the work.
“I find that women incur a penalty when they co-author that men do not experience,” Sarsons said in the paper’s abstract.
Blake Martin, a graduate student studying sociology who also has an interest in gender inequality issues, said, “I thought [the study] was interesting, but I wasn’t necessarily surprised by the findings.”
However, Melinda Morrill, assistant professor of economics, found the results of the study “interesting and provocative.”
Morrill, who was recently tenured, is critical of the paper’s recent media attention. The study has recently been the focus of articles in The New York Times, as well as Huffington Post.
“I think [the paper] is not particularly polished, so I think it is somewhat a shame that it is receiving a lot of media attention now because I suspect that the results may really not be what’s going on,” Morrill said. “When I read the paper, what I see is a lot of assumptions, a lot of issues with the data, some technical concerns with her approach that I suspect will be resolved as she revises the paper.”
Part of the study contrasts economics with other fields, such as sociology. In economics, the authors of a paper are listed alphabetically, whereas in sociology the author who contributes the most is listed first.
This may seem like a slight distinction, but it may help to explain differences in gender bias. The results that the study found in the field of economics were not present with respect to sociology, thus backing up the idea that women in economics suffer from gender bias.
However, according to Martin, this does not necessarily mean that sociology is without gender inequities.
Martin likened Sarsons’s paper to a study published in 2014 by members of the NC State sociology department. This study, titled “What’s in a Name: Exposing Gender Bias in Student Ratings of Teachers,” compared the way students taking online classes rated their teachers when they were told a teacher was male to when they were told the same teacher was female.
The experiment found that students consistently rated the teachers they thought were female lower than they rated the teachers they thought were male.
“I think gender inequality is a problem throughout academia and throughout society, it just manifests itself in different ways in different departments,” Martin said.
One problem that Morrill had with Sarsons’s study is how it doesn’t account for the fact that most economic papers are co-authored, and the decisions of who people work with are not random.
“Whenever you think of gender and economics, you just have to keep in the back of your head that it is only recently that women are really entering into the economics field at the same rate as men,” Morrill said. “Often, co-authorship is done with more senior people; often more senior people are going to be male. That’s not current discrimination, that’s an echo from the past.”
Martin, on the other hand, disagrees. “Reading through [Sarons’s] methods section, I think [her] methods are valid,” Martin said. “I couldn’t find any methodological issues with it.”
Morrill summed up her opinions on Sarsons’s paper by saying, “I think she raises a very interesting, provocative idea, that group work could have different rewards for men than for women, that women could be getting different credit for what they do in the workplace. I’m not sure that I believe that she’s proven that.”
In contrast, Martin said, “A lot of our biases are hidden, and I think that [Sarsons’s study] got at that really well.”
I think gender inequality is a problem throughout academia and throughout society, it just manifests itself in different ways in different departments.