Publishing While Female: are Women Held to Higher Standards? Evidence from Peer Review

Abstract

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.

Explicit and Implicit Belief-Based Gender Discrimination: A Hiring Experiment

“…Evidence has been documented in a diverse range of contexts including bargaining (Ayres and Siegelman, 1995;Bowles, Babcock, and Lai, 2007;Small, Gelfand, Babcock, and Gettman, 2007), hiring (Jowell and Prescott-Clarke, 1970;Newman, 1978;McIntyre, Moberg, and Posner, 1980;Yinger, 1986;Riach and Rich, 1987;Glick, Zion, and Nelson, 1988;Neumark, Bank, and Van Nort, 1996;Biernat and Kobrynowicz, 1997;Goldin and Rouse, 2000;Bertrand and Mullainathan, 2004;Reuben, Sapienza, and Zingales, 2014;Bohnet, Van Geen, and Bazerman, 2015;Milkman, Akinola, and Chugh, 2015;Kübler, Schmid, and Stüber, 2018;Bohren, Haggag, Imas, and Pope, 2020;Coffman, Exley, and Niederle, 2020), referrals, promotions, and recognition for (group-)work (Isaksson, 2018;Coffman, Flikkema, and Shurchkov, 2021;Sarsons, 2019;Hengel, 2022;Card, DellaVigna, Funk, and Iriberri, 2020;Sarsons, Gërxhani, Reuben, and Schram, 2021).…”

Self-Citation, Cumulative Advantage, and Gender Inequality in Science

“…One promising line of work digs into the beast that is the journal peer review process, a specific type of multi-staged, gatekeeping system that applies to the process of publishing articles (and sometimes books). While there is little evidence to suggest that editors are more likely to accept manuscripts written by men compared to women (e.g., Borsuk et al 2009;Blank 1991), there is compelling evidence to suggest that women on average generate higher quality work during the peer review process (Hengel 2017), in part because reviewers and editors appear to impose higher standards on women (Card et al 2020). 21 Ultimately, this process could push women to "spend too much time rewriting old papers and not enough time writing new papers" (Hengel 2017: p. 3).…”

“…Hengel's (2017) analyses, too, suggest that women engage in more work in the peer review process more so because editors and reviewers implicitly set the bar higher for women and less so because of supply-side differences in say, how authors respond to negative reviews.…”

Investigating writing style as a contributor to gender gaps in science and technology

“…Prior scholarship has highlighted differences in field, topic choice, or research quality as playing an important role in explaining observed gaps between men and women (Leahey, 2007;Key and Sumner, 2019). While these factors are undoubtedly important, studies have also shown that even when accounting for field, topic choice, and quality, men's and women's research is evaluated differently (Hengel, 2017;Hengel and Moon, 2020). Studies further report gender gaps even in the presence of double-blind review (Kolev et al, 2020;Mahajan et al, 2020), suggesting that conscious or unconscious bias based on the identity of the author is likely not the determinative factor(van der Lee and Ellemers, 2015;Hospido and Sanz, 2019;Card et al, 2021Card et al, , 2020b.…”