There is a persistent gender gap in economics, which starts at undergraduate level and extends through graduate study, junior academic positions, tenure, and to the professoriate. The gender gap gets worse as you move up through each level, with women making up a smaller proportion as you go. Many studies have now looked into this, but one aspect is relatively under-explored - how different genders respond to setbacks in the publishing process.
That research gap is what makes this recent working paper by Gauri Kartini Shastry and Olga Shurchkov (both Wellesley College) most interesting. They presented a sample of around 1300 academic economists with a hypothetical scenario regarding the rejection of a paper. Specifically:
Respondents then read a hypothetical decision letter from an editor which begins by describing referee reactions to a paper the respondent hypothetically submitted for publication at a top general-interest journal. Our experimental manipulation randomizes respondents into three main treatments: a revise and resubmit decision (R&R), a reject and resubmit decision (RJR), and a flat rejection (FR); this randomization affects only the last few lines of the decision letter. A key feature of the design is that outcomes are measured following almost identical decision letters from an editor on a hypothetical paper, ensuring that all respondents are given the same information about the quality of this submission. We are interested in the differential effect of the more negative treatments (FR/RJR) relative to the baseline (weak R&R) on the respondents’ perceived likelihood of eventually publishing the paper in a highly-regarded journal.
Shastry and Shurchkov find that:
...getting an RJR reduces the perceived likelihood of publishing the paper in any leading journal relative to an R&R, but getting a rejection has the most negative impact. On average, negative decisions have similar effects on men and women. However, we observe heterogeneous effects by rank: female assistant professors who get a rejection perceive an 18 pp lower likelihood of publishing the paper in any leading journal than male assistant professors, as compared to the difference across genders for those who get an R&R. The gender gap is not present among tenured associate and full professors.
Shastry and Shurchkov try to tease out the mechanism explaining these results, positing that:
...female assistant professors attribute the negative feedback of a rejection to subpar quality of their work to a greater extent than men do, and that this is exacerbated by the time constraint of an upcoming review.
There is some evidence to support this explanation. However, the more interesting (to me) finding is that the gender gap closes after tenure. On this point, I strongly suspect that there is some survivorship bias. That is, economists who are less resilient to negative feedback may be less likely to achieve tenure, and if male economists are (because they are more confident, or some other reason) more resilient, then more male economists would survive to tenure than female economists. And both male and female economists who survive to tenure will tend to be similar in terms of how they respond to negative feedback. That's speculative on my part. Shastry and Shurchkov have no evidence in favour of it, but neither are they able to discount it as a possibility.
This paper is useful in filling in a bit more detail on how the gender gap in economics arises. However, it would be useful to build on this work in order to better understand the mechanisms that underlie it, because it is the mechanisms that are the source of the problem.
[HT: Marginal Revolution, last year]
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