Some Evidence for a Gender Gap in Personality and Social Psychology

Abstract

This research examined a possible gender gap in personality and social psychology. According to membership demographics from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), women and men are represented near parity in the field. Yet despite this equal representation, the field may still suffer from a different type of gender gap. We examined the gender of first authors in two major journals, citations to these articles, and gender of award recipients. In random samples of five issues per year across 10 years (2004–2013; N = 1,094), 34% of first authors in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology were women and 44% of first authors in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin were women. Articles authored by men were cited more than those authored by women. In examining the gender of award recipients given by SPSP (2000–2016), on average, 25% of the recipients were women.

Are STEM Faculty Biased Against Female Applicants? A Robust Replication and Extension of Moss-Racusin and Colleagues (2012)

“…A similar gap was found in social and personality psychology, a field in which women outnumber men according to membership statistics from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (Brown & Goh, 2016). But despite this emerging membership trend, the authors found that men receive more awards than women (Brown & Goh, 2016). Their results mirror findings in other areas, such as an analysis of awards data from 13 STEM societies revealing that men received more awards than women, and this number was higher than expected based on the proportion of male to female nominees in the pool (Lincoln et al, 2012).…”

“…A similar gap was found in social and personality psychology, a field in which women outnumber men according to membership statistics from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (Brown & Goh, 2016). But despite this emerging membership trend, the authors found that men receive more awards than women (Brown & Goh, 2016).…”

25 años de Suma Psicológica. Un análisis bibliométrico

“…Por otra parte, se están analizando las características y las implicaciones de estudios de la literatura en proyectos de mujeres, lo cual ha dado cuenta de un importante crecimiento de sus trabajos en un estudio de más de 100 años (Tsay & Li, 2017). Específicamente, en psicología, se observa una paridad de género en el número de autores y una asimetría de género que es mucho menor que en la ciencia y en otras disciplinas (González-Álvarez & Cervera-Crespo, 2017), aunque, algunos análisis de la producción en áreas particulares, tal es el caso de la psicología social y de la personalidad revela un mayor porcentaje de artículos publicados y citados desarrollados por hombres (Brown & Goh, 2016).…”

A Model of Political Bias in Social Science Research

“…Similarly, much (we suspect most) of the discourse about sexist bias in education, academia, STEM, and even psychology emphasizes the difficulties women face (e.g., Brown & Goh, 2016;Greider et al, 2019;Handelsman et al, 2005;Knobloch-Westerwick, Glynn, & Huge, 2013;Ledgerwood, Haines, & Ratliff, 2015;Milkman, Akinola, & Chugh, 2012;Moss-Racusin, Dovidio, Brescoll, Graham, & Handelsman, 2012;National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018;Nature, 2015;Steele, James, & Barnett, 2016;Steinpreis, Anders, & Ritzke, 1999; United States National Academy of Sciences, 2007;Wenneras & Wold, 1997). Nonetheless, women now represent a majority of social psychologists, most of the leadership in at least one of the main social psychology professional organizations (SPSP, 2019), a majority of psychologists (American Psychological Association, 2015, and have been more likely to complete high school, college, and graduate degrees than have men for about 40 years (Sharp, 2010).…”