Gender Differences in Recognition of Coauthored Research: Evidence from the Italian Academia

Loading...
Thumbnail Image

URL

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

School of Business | Master's thesis

Date

2017

Major/Subject

Mcode

Degree programme

Economics

Language

en

Pages

51

Series

Abstract

I use data from Italian National Qualification evaluations to analyse whether women and men re-ceive differential credit for their coauthored work. National-level committees assess applicants' research quality, and a positive assessment is a requirement for promotion to associate and full professorship in Italian universities. I find that, conditional on the candidates’ individual characteristics and publications’ average qual-ity, the returns to an extra last- and middle-authored publication are, respectively, 35% and over 50% lower for women. On the other hand, I find no gender differences in the returns to single- and first-authored publications. The evidence is consistent with the possibility that women are evaluated differently from men in the presence of information asymmetries and stereotypes. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that gender differences in the attribution of credit for coauthored work emerge only in applications for associate professorship, where information asymmetries are larger. Moreover, stereotypes in science seem to penalise women when they undertake leadership roles as heads of labs, as women appear to suffer a last-authorship penalty in STEMM fields (sci-ence, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine). Additionally, using data on all publications in the Italian academia from the past twenty years, I explore whether observed coauthorship patterns are consistent with the possibility that women anticipate a coauthorship disadvantage. I find some support for the hypothesis that women might strategically engage in coauthorship in the presence of potential information asymmetries and stereotypes. In fact, in smaller fields, there are no gender differences in the propensity to coauthor, whereas in larger ones, women have fewer coauthors than men. In STEMM fields where authors are listed alphabetically, the gender difference in the share of female coauthors is consistently larger than in STEMM fields where authors are listed according to contribution.

Description

Thesis advisor

Zinovyeva, Natalia

Keywords

economics, academic, evaluations, coauthorship, gender, discrimination, information, asymmetries

Other note

Citation