The Gender Gap in Scholarly Self-Promotion on Social Media

Abstract

Self-promotion in science is ubiquitous but not exercised to the same extent by everyone. It is unclear whether there are gender differences in the frequency of self-promotion or the benefits individuals get from it. Here, we examine gender differences in scholarly self-promotion using 7M Tweet mentions of 539K research papers published in 2018 by 1.3M authors. Our analysis shows that female authors are significantly less likely than male authors to promote their papers, even after controlling for a number of important factors including journal impact, affiliation prestige, author productivity and number of citations, authorship position, number of coauthors, and research topics. The magnitude of the gender gap is more strongly associated with papers' journal impact factor than authors' affiliation prestige, previous productivity, or academic discipline. In particular, male scholars are 60\% more likely than comparable female scholars to self-promote papers published in journals with very high impact factor, whereas the difference is only 28\% for papers in low impact journals. Although women self-promote less often overall, when they do, their papers receive slightly more mentions on Twitter. Our findings offer the first large-scale evidence for a gender gap in scholarly self-promotion online and show the circumstances under which the gap is most substantial, helping inform policy aimed at mitigating discrepancies in visibility and recognition.

Digital selves: A cross-cultural examination of athlete social media self-presentation during the 2020 Tokyo Olympics

“…When female entrepreneurs demonstrate agentic qualities, such as competence, charisma, and self-promotion, they frequently encounter backlash for defying gender stereotypes (Rudman et al, 2012;Thebaud, 2010). As a result, women are often less likely to engage in self-promotion, especially in male-dominated domains (Exley and Kessler, 2022;Peng et al, 2022). Residing in a society where entrepreneurship is primarily constructed as a male territory, female South Korean Olympians may consciously or unconsciously limit their sharing of business-related content on social media platforms.…”

An open data set of scholars on Twitter

“…This provides some support for our choice not to cast a broader net by removing the self-tweet criterion, which would have likely flooded our data set with false positives for low expected gains in true positives and would also have dramatically increased the computational resources to perform the matching. It may also create a gender bias in our data set because a study by Peng, Teplitskiy et al (2022) found men to be more likely to self-promote on Twitter than women. Finally, we also know from past research that there is a lower uptake of Twitter use in some regions or countries (Zahedi, 2017).…”