Homophily, Biased Attention, and the Gender Gap in Science

Abstract

How does homophilous collaboration influence women's early career progress? To answer this question, we turn to a granular dataset of 3,233 highly qualified junior life scientists who receive mentored, early career sponsorship from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and analyze their publication trajectories as careers unfold. Employing a matched sample approach that exploits variance in the sets of research contacts the junior scientists start out with, we distinguish sex differences in collaboration choices from potential differences in collaboration opportunities. We document that outsized gender homophily among women exists and primarily stems from how female leaders of scientific projects assemble their teams. Women continue same-sex collaborations as lead authors at twice the rate compared to men, on average, and in particular when the mentor is part of the author team or when the focal junior scientist leads the team. As such, systematic gender homophily among female scientists may engender the sponsorship and resources needed to motivate young women to join and pursue an academic career. On the flip side, we show that author teams led by women receive 11% less citations, on average, and up to 29% less citations for work of comparable caliber published in the most influential journals. Taken together, while women's propensity to working with other women may support early career researchers, biased attention to women's work may harm careers and, in particular, women who publish in the highest-impact journals and who would otherwise be poised to narrowing gender gaps at more senior career stages.

“Part of Something Larger than Myself”: Lessons Learned From a Multidisciplinary, Multicultural, and Multilingual International Research Team of Academic Women

“…They explained that this pattern may be due to the fact that these men were engaged in fields, such as the hard sciences (Bozeman et al, 2015; Witze, 2016), that frequently facilitate these collaborations. When single-gendered research teams (i.e., all women or all men) do form, cited benefits include simplified communications and higher levels of trust between collaborators (Ghiasi et al, 2018; Kegen, 2013; Lerchenmueller et al, 2019).…”

“…Interestingly, they found that in cross gender publication, the research most often had a female author as the lead (Nunkoo et al, 2020). Further, Lerchenmueller et al (2019) and Ghiasi et al (2018) found more single-gendered research teams (i.e., all women or all men), with cited benefits including simplified communications and higher trust between collaborators (Kegen, 2013).…”

Relationships between changing communication networks and changing perceptions of psychological safety in a team science setting: Analysis with actor-oriented social network models

“…Diversity in demographic variables, such as race, gender, discipline, and cultural backgrounds could impact team collaboration dynamics [34]. Gender homophily is commonly observed in various social networks including communication networks [35][36][37]. Scholars' disciplinary training as well as their team membership are expected to impact their communication networks.…”