The unequal impact of parenthood in academia

Across academia, men and women tend to publish at unequal rates. Existing explanations include the potentially unequal impact of parenthood on scholarship, but a lack of appropriate data has prevented its clear assessment. Here, we quantify the impact of parenthood on scholarship using an extensive survey of the timing of parenthood events, longitudinal publication data, and perceptions of research expectations among 3064 tenure-track faculty at 450 Ph.D.-granting computer science, history, and business departments across the United States and Canada, along with data on institution-specific parental leave policies. Parenthood explains most of the gender productivity gap by lowering the average short-term productivity of mothers, even as parents tend to be slightly more productive on average than nonparents. However, the size of productivity penalty for mothers appears to have shrunk over time. Women report that paid parental leave and adequate childcare are important factors in their recruitment and retention. These results have broad implications for efforts to improve the inclusiveness of scholarship.

Examining the Gender Productivity Gap among Farm Households in Mali

This paper decomposes the gender agricultural productivity gap and measures the factors that influence the gap between male and female agricultural plot managers in Mali. The Oaxaca–Blinder approach and the recentred influence function (RIF) decomposition methodology are applied to a nationally representative survey of Mali. The results show that the agricultural productivity of female plot managers is 20.18% lower than that of male plot managers. Additionally, while more than half (56%) of the agricultural productivity gap is influenced by female-specific structural disadvantages, 44% of the gap is due to an endowment effect. Socio-economic characteristics such as the educational level and age of the plot manager, environmental factors and agricultural production practices, i.e., the differential use of inputs (organic or inorganic fertiliser and improved seeds) and the use of hired female workers seem to affect the female-specific structural disadvantages. To reduce or close the gender productivity gap, the underlying causes of female-specific structural disadvantages must be addressed to enable female farmers to obtain the same returns as men. Traditional means of addressing the gender gap, such as providing education for women in rural areas and facilitating rural women’ access to extension services and improved seeds, can mitigate the endowment deficit. This paper highlights the need to develop a better understanding of the factors influencing the structural disadvantages faced by female farmers in Mali that could feed into the development of more effective policies to address the gender gap in agricultural productivity, improving productivity and gender equity and reducing poverty.

The Gender Productivity Gap in Croatian Science: Women Are Catching up with Males and Becoming Even Better

How much different genders contribute to citations and whether we see different gender patterns between STEM and non-STEM researchers are questions that have long been studied in academia. Here we analyze the research output in terms of citations collected from the Web of Science of males and females from the largest Croatian university, University of Zagreb. Applying the Mann–Whitney statistical test, for most faculties, we demonstrate no gender difference in research output except for seven faculties, where males are significantly better than females on six faculties. We find that female STEM full professors are significantly more cited than male colleagues, while male non-STEM assistant professors are significantly more cited than their female colleagues. There are ten faculties where females have the larger average citations than their male colleagues and eleven faculties where the most cited researcher is woman. For the most cited researchers, our Zipf plot analyses demonstrate that both genders follow power laws, where the exponent calculated for male researchers is moderately larger than the exponent for females. The exponent for STEM citations is slightly larger than the exponent obtained for non-STEM citations, implying that compared to non-STEM, STEM research output leads to fatter tails and so larger citations inequality than non-STEM.

Is there any gender gap in the production of legumes in Malawi? Evidence from the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition model

Understanding the gender differences in agricultural productivity is crucial for formulating informed and effective policies to sustainably improve low productivity which characterises agriculture in Sub-Sahara Africa. Using a panel dataset from the ICRISAT led Tropical Legumes project III (2008–2013), we analyse the gender gap in the production of legumes in Malawi. Employing the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition method allows decomposition of gender gap into the following: (i) the portion caused by observable differences in the factors of production (endowment effect) and (ii) the unexplained portion caused by differences in return to the same observed factors of production (structural effect). We conducted the empirical analysis separately for pigeonpea and groundnut. Our findings reveal that for groundnut cultivated plots, women are 28% less productive than men after controlling for observed factors of production; however, the gender gap estimated in the pigeonpea cultivated plots are not statistically significant. The decomposition estimates reveal that the endowment effect is more relevant than the structural effect, suggesting that access to productive inputs contributes largest to the gender gap in groundnut productivity, and if women involved had access to equal level of inputs, the gap will be reduced significantly. The variation in the findings for groundnut and pigeon plot suggests that policy orientation towards reducing gender productivity gap should be crop specific.

Unravelling the gender productivity gap in science: a meta-analytical review

Women underrepresentation in science has frequently been associated with women being less productive than men (i.e. the gender productivity gap), which may be explained by women having lower success rates, producing science of lower impact and/or suffering gender bias. By performing global meta-analyses, we show that there is a gender productivity gap mostly supported by a larger scientific production ascribed to men. However, women and men show similar success rates when the researchers' work is directly evaluated (i.e. publishing articles). Men's success rate is higher only in productivity proxies involving peer recognition (e.g. evaluation committees, academic positions). Men's articles showed a tendency to have higher global impact but only if studies include self-citations. We detected gender bias against women in research fields where women are underrepresented (i.e. those different from Psychology). Historical numerical unbalance, socio-psychological aspects and cultural factors may influence differences in success rate, science impact and gender bias. Thus, the maintenance of a women-unfriendly academic and non-academic environment may perpetuate the gender productivity gap. New policies to build a more egalitarian and heterogeneous scientific community and society are needed to close the gender gap in science.