Men get credit where women do not

A (sole-authored) paper presented at the American Economic Association annual meeting this weekend. Summary from InsideHigherEd:

To determine the impact of co-authorship, Sarsons tracked all of economics professors who came up for tenure between 1985 and 2014 at 30 top universities, all places that stress tenure candidates’ research credentials. She considered various factors to control for paper and journal quality through such measures as citation indexes.

Her findings:

• Men and women who are solo authors of most of their papers have similar rates of tenure, when factoring in measures of paper quality.
• When men co-author papers, each such paper is associated with an increase of 8 percent in the odds of the man earning tenure. But when women co-author papers, each such paper is associated only with a 2 percent increase in the odds of earning tenure.

Sarsons argues in her paper that there is additional evidence that women and men are judged differently when they co-author papers. When women co-author papers with women, the impact of co-authored papers is similar to that for male faculty members. But when papers are co-authored with men, there is more of an impact, suggesting that review committees assume that papers written by a man and a woman reflect the work of the man more than the woman.