The New York Times | Spotlights research by Heather Sarsons, Ph.D. candidate in Economics, showing that when female economists co-author with men, they incur a substantial penalty in their tenure prospects that their male colleagues do not.
"The numbers tell a compelling story of men getting the credit whenever there is any ambiguity about who deserves credit for work performed in teams. And this is a very big deal: The bias that Ms. Sarsons documents is so large that it may account on its own for another statistic: [That while women in the field publish as much as men], female economists are twice as likely to be denied tenure as their male colleagues."
"The numbers," writes Justin Wolfers (Ph.D. '01, now University of Michigan) in his review of Sarsons's research, "tell a compelling story of men getting the credit whenever there is any ambiguity about who deserves credit for work performed in teams.
"And this is a very big deal: The bias that Ms. Sarsons documents is so large that it may
account on its own for another statistic: [That while women in the field publish as much as men], female economists are twice as likely to be denied tenure as their male colleagues."
Beyond the field of economics, the pattern that Sarsons pinpoints, suggests Wolfers, "may explain why women struggle to get ahead in other professions involving teamwork."
In contrast, in settings where attribution is more explicit, reducing the need to draw inferences (where biases can enter), Sarsons hypothesizes that we should see men and women benefiting in more equal measure from collaborative work. Her initial results from sociology, where authors are often listed in order of contribution, lend support to this idea: There she found no penalty to female coauthors.
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