Publishing, signaling, social capital, and gender: Determinants of becoming a tenured professor in German political science

Gender bias in evaluating assistant professorship applicants? Evidence from harmonized survey experiments in Germany and Italy

This study investigates gender biases in the evaluation of applicants for assistant professorships in Germany and Italy. Drawing on the justification-suppression model of prejudice expression, we explore whether biases against women are expressed, suppressed, or even reversed in the appointment process, considering the different normative gender climates and gender equality strategies in the two countries. Using harmonized factorial survey experiments with professors of economics, political science, and social sciences, we found that women in Germany have an advantage both in perceived qualification for an assistant professorship and in the propensity to receive an interview invitation. In contrast, women in Italy are neither disadvantaged nor advantaged. We also examine whether gender biases exist when there is ambiguity about applicants' academic performance (co-authorship) and career commitment (parental leave). Our results reveal a co-authorship penalty and a parenthood premium in both countries, with no gender differences observed. Our exploratory country comparison suggests that Germany's proactive gender equality policies may be more effective in reducing the gender gap in assistant professor appointments compared to Italy's gender-neutral approach, by favoring equally qualified female applicants.

Getting ahead in the social sciences: How parenthood and publishing contribute to gender gaps in academic career advancement

How do parenthood and publishing contribute to gender gaps in academic career advancement? While extensive research examines the causes of gender disparities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers, we know much less about the factors that constrain women's advancement in the social sciences. Combining detailed career- and administrative register data on 976 Danish social scientists in Business and Management, Economics, Political Science, Psychology, and Sociology (5703 person-years) that obtained a PhD degree between 2000 and 2015, we estimate gender differences in attainment of senior research positions and parse out how publication outputs, parenthood and parental leave contribute to these differences. Our approach is advantageous over previous longitudinal studies in that we track the careers and publication outputs of graduates from the outset of their PhD education and match this data with time-sensitive information on each individual's publication activities and family situation. In discrete time-event history models, we observe a ∼24 per cent female disadvantage in advancement likelihoods within the first 7 years after PhD graduation, with gender differences increasing over the observation period. A decomposition indicates that variations in publishing, parenthood and parental leave account for ∼ 40 per cent of the gender gap in career advancement, suggesting that other factors, including recruitment disparities, asymmetries in social capital and experiences of unequal treatment at work, may also constrain women's careers.

Research patterns in communication (2009–2019): testing female representation and productivity differences, within the most cited authors and the field

This study compares the share of male/female as first authors, the growth of authors per paper, and the differences in publication productivity in the last decade of the most cited authors versus the field of communication (i.e., a representative sample of papers published in the field of communication). Results indicate that there are significantly more female first authors in the field than a decade ago, but their proportion among the most cited authors has not grown at a similar pace. Likewise, the number of authors per paper has significantly increased in the field, but not among the most cited authors, who, in turn, publish significantly more papers than the field, both in 2009 and 2019. And not only that, the productivity gap between the most cited authors and the field has substantially increased between the span of this decade. Theoretical implications of these findings and suggestions for future studies are also discussed.

Benefits and detriments of interdisciplinarity on early career scientists’ performance. An author-level approach for U.S. physicists and psychologists

Is the pursuit of interdisciplinary or innovative research beneficial or detrimental for the impact of early career researchers? We focus on young scholars as they represent an understudied population who have yet to secure a place within academia. Which effects promise higher scientific recognition (i.e., citations) is therefore crucial for the high-stakes decisions young researchers face. To capture these effects, we introduce measurements for interdisciplinarity and novelty that can be applied to a researcher’s career. In contrast to previous studies investigating research impact on the paper level, hence, our paper focuses on a career perspective (i.e., the level of authors). To consider different disciplinary cultures, we utilize a comprehensive dataset on U.S. physicists (n = 4003) and psychologists (n = 4097), who graduated between 2008 and 2012, and traced their publication records. Our results indicate that conducting interdisciplinary research as an early career researcher in physics is beneficial, while it is negatively associated with research impact in psychology. In both fields, physics and psychology, early career researchers focusing on novel combinations of existing knowledge are associated with higher future impact. Taking some risks by deviating to a certain degree from mainstream paradigms seems therefore like a rewarding strategy for young scholars.

Do peers share the same criteria for assessing grant applications?

This study examines a basic assumption of peer review, namely, the idea that there is a consensus on evaluation criteria among peers, which is a necessary condition for the reliability of peer judgements. Empirical evidence indicating that there is no consensus or more than one consensus would offer an explanation for the disagreement effect, the low inter-rater reliability consistently observed in peer review. To investigate this basic assumption, we have surveyed all humanities scholars in Switzerland on 23 grant review criteria. We have employed latent class tree modelling to identify subgroups in which scholars rated criteria similarly (i.e. latent classes) and to explore covariates predicting class membership. We have identified two consensus classes, two consensus-close classes, and a consensus-far class. The consensus classes contain a core consensus (10 criteria related to knowledge gaps; feasibility; rigour; comprehensibility and argumentation; academic relevance; competence and experience of the applicant) and a broad consensus that include the core consensus plus eight contribution-related criteria, such as originality. These results provide a possible explanation for the disagreement effect. Moreover, the results are consistent with the notion of conservatism, which holds that original research is undervalued in peer review, while other aspects, such as methodology and feasibility, are overweighted. The covariate analysis indicated that age and having tenure increase from the consensus far to the consensus close to the consensus classes. This suggests that the more academic experience scholars accumulate, the more their understanding of review criteria conforms to the social norm.

How human capital, universities of excellence, third party funding, mobility and gender explain productivity in German political science

Using a unique panel dataset of virtually all German academic political scientists, we show that researchers become much more productive due to the accumulation of human capital and third party funding. We also show however, that while universities of excellence have more productive researchers, individuals who go there do not become more productive. Finally, we show how women publish only 9 percent less than men with the same level of prior publication experience, but are about 26 percent less productive over their entire career, as early productivity leads to later productivity, so that women increasingly fall behind. These results cannot be explained through the influence of childbearing. Rather, they support the ‘theory of limited differences’, which argues that small differences in early productivity accumulate to large differences over entire careers, as early success encourages later success. Apart from generally showing why political scientists publish more or less, we specifically identify accumulative advantage as the principal reason why women increasingly fall behind men over the course of their careers.