The Gender Gap in Citations: Does It Persist?

Abstract

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, several researchers showed the importance, in the United States, of the number of times scholars' publications are cited for determining their bargaining power in academia. Not surprisingly, the question was soon raised whether citations are a good measure of scholarly merit. Are women at a disadvantage in male-dominated fields, such as economics? Studies had shown that authors tended to cite a larger proportion of publications by authors of the same gender. This paper examines whether women's disadvantage in garnering citations has been reduced by the increasing representation of women in economics and finds that this has been the case in both labor economics and economics in general, albeit not to the same degree.

Keywords:

• Academia
• citations
• discrimination
• publications
• tokens
• women
• JEL Codes: J7; Z

Notes

The other studies cited here all focus on the United States, with the exception of Ferber (1986), which includes Canadian journals. We have not been able to find comparable published studies for other countries. They are nonetheless of interest to scholars from other countries because the peripatetic scholars of today frequently have visiting appointments in the US and because institutions in many other countries likely give credit for citations in US journals.

Some earlier studies even suggested that women themselves also thought more highly of the work of men than of women (for example, Philip A. Goldberg 1968 and Gail I. Pheterson, Sarah B. Kiesler, and Philip A. Goldberg 1971), but there is no evidence that this has been true in more recent years.

Except in instances of multiple authorship where there was at least one female and one male author in any case.

It should be noted that because the proportion of women was even smaller in the past and because some citations are from substantially earlier years, male bias against citing women will be somewhat overstated, while the opposite will be true for female bias against men.

Interestingly, Carole Hollenshead (2003) reports that the University of Michigan, recognizing that it was more difficult for women to find collaborators, provided funds for which they could apply that would enable them to spend summers at other institutions where they had co-authors.

In these kinds of surveys, one must beware of statistical results being significantly distorted by a few frequently cited “star” authors. A cursory examination of our data revealed no such obvious “stars”; but if a larger study were to be done, a comparison of the distributions of citation frequencies for each author type, FA, FMA, and MA, would be helpful before more precise statistical inferences were attempted.

According to the 2006 report of the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession, they comprised only 24.8 percent of the faculty at the top ten research institutions.