Male and female academics are equally cited

From A Rare Case of Gender Parity in Academia by Freda B Lynn, Mary C Noonan, Michael Sauder, and Matthew A Andersson. From the Abstract.

In academia, women trail men in nearly every major professional reward, such as earnings, publications, and funding. Bibliometric studies, however, suggest that citations are unique with regard to gender inequality: female penalties have been reported, but gender parity or even female premiums are routinely documented as well. Two questions follow from this puzzle. First, does gender matter for citations in sociology and neighboring social science disciplines? No theoretically informed study of gender and citations exists for the social science core. We begin to fill this gap by analyzing roughly 10,000 publications in economics, political science, and sociology. In contrast to many big data studies, we estimate the effect of author gender on citations alongside other author-, article-, journal-, and (sub)field-level predictors. Our results strongly suggest that when male and female authors publish articles that are comparably positioned to receive citations, their publications do in fact accrue citations at the same rate. This finding raises a second question: Why would gender matter “everywhere but here”? We hypothesize that the answer is related to the mechanisms (e.g., self-selection, biased assessments of commitment) that are activated in the context of some professional rewards but not citations. We discuss why a null gender finding should not be discarded as an anomaly but rather approached as an analytical opportunity.

There are two elements to this argument. They are leading with the analysis of citations and the finding that when male and female researchers publish, the sex of the research author has no predictive value in determining the frequency of citation whereas prior research, institutional prestige and the like are good predictors of the volume of citation.

Men and women researchers accrue citations in equal fashion.

Lynn et al are intrigued by the fact that there is non-discrimination as measured by citations based on sex of researcher whereas there are clearly documented differences between the sexes in terms of awards, recognition, etc. and are seeking to understand why this might be the case.

This is analogous to the labor market topical concern of the past thirty years when it was assumed that differences in total average compensation between men and women in the marketplace must be due to discrimination. What has been found, however, is that men and women earn nearly exactly the same amount as one another when you control for obvious factors such as years in the field, hours worked, past accomplishments, etc. Deviant outcomes (average compensation) arise between the sexes based on deviant decisions (field of practice, perseverance in the field, duration, hours worked, etc.) made between the sexes and not based on systematic discrimination.

Understanding the corresponding dynamics in academia is the second part of the Lynn et al argument. They posit that there are three commonly acknowledged mechanisms for differentiation:

There is broad consensus that inequality is rooted in one of three main classes of mechanisms: (a) gender differences in human and social capital, (b) self-selection, and (c) various forms of discrimination, including taste-based discrimination (Becker 1971), biased assessments of competence (e.g., Moss-Racusin et al. 2012; Ridgeway and Correll 2004), and biased assessments of commitment

They argue that self-selection (choices by women on where to spend their time) and commitment (perceptions by others of women's commitment) are irrelevant or mute in determining number of citations but plausibly causal in determining other rewards.

They are still trying to find discrimination as a cause of reward disproportionalities. Possibly that is the cause. But, given the lessons learned from the field of labor economics and the three decade effort to find that bias and discrimination are the root causes of income variance only to eventually have to acknowledge that income variances are due to personal choices, the odds are that rewards variances in academia are also going to end up to be due to productivity variances arising from personal choices rather than active bias and discrimination.

We already see elements supporting the latter conclusion. Academia tends to be pretty generous and egalitarian with benefits, including parental leave. There have been a couple of papers or more in the past couple of years, gnawing on the revelation that female academics take parental leave and invest that time in caring for their children whereas their male peers take that time and write more papers. Choices.