women and publication rates

[Katrina Gulliver]

There were a few stories during 2020 about women submitting articles at a lower rate due to the pandemic (for obvious reasons: childcare tends to be done more by women, and when schools went remote women academics were having to deal with that; in academia women tend to shoulder more of the "pastoral" work, and students in various crises also spiraled during the pandemic, plus remote and hiflex teaching adding to workloads).

During 2020 and 2021, there were anecdotal reports from journal editors that men's submissions were up, and women's down. Now it seems to be showing up in the journals.
I'm judging an article prize (for women), and our submission numbers are down, and when I went to actually count articles on the contents pages of journals I can see the drop from pre 2020. One editor even wrote to me (having nominated articles for this prize in the past), and said they had published NO articles by women in 2022.

I'm assuming this is going to hit women going up for tenure in the next couple of years too. (even if everyone is given some kind of pandemic-break, if men kept publishing at the same right, or indeed a HIGHER rate, it means women will look worse by comparison).

[Ruralguy]

I'm in a position to see a lot of CV's , especially for pre-full faculty, and although there probably is a COVID effect, I don't see it affecting women more than men, but it might be an issue of small number stats, or selection for men who are also caretakers at an undergraduate focused school. Then again, my school tries not to bean count, in a review for tenure, we wouldn't be differentiating a woman with 4 publications since covid from a man with 6 or vice vera. They would just both look like successful faculty to us. So, I suppose if we were charged to actually data mine and look for this, we might see a small effect that isn't noticeable  when looking at things more holistically.   

[Ruralguy]

Oh, I should add: We have many more younger women on the faculty than we would have had, say 20 years ago. A significant number have put off child rearing, and since I haven't had that conversation with them (kind of rude and asking for a Title IX hearing!) I am not sure for how long (could be forever). Anyway, that *could* explain why my school doesn't apparently see the effect others are seeing...but it could just all be a small number stats thing.

[Sun_Worshiper]

People have short memories and the goodwill about cutting people slack due to COVID will probably be forgotten by the time covid-era assistants go up for tenure (most schools seem to have extended the clock a year or two). This suggests that women who have lagged their male peers in publishing will be denied tenure disproportionately.

This is just a hypothesis at this point, but I'd bet that it will be borne out by the data down the road.

[Ruralguy]

If the original supposition is correct, or cautiously stated, where the original supposition is correct, then SW's conclusions are probably also correct.

Our college's P&T committee did indeed give wide latitude between about 2020 and 2022. But now, say, 2 reviews later, if you don't have the publications, don't teach well, and haven't served on a committee other than party planning, then, its on you and not the plague. Just like with students, at some point, you just run out of runway. That is, take flight or don't. I'm not saying that as a justification for bias, and I do think tenure clock stoppage is good policy, but at some point, you just have to judge someone fairly and make some conclusions.

[Hibush]

As someone who studies underlying mechaninsms, I look at patterns like this and immediately ask what is the cause. In this case, it is important to know what the cause is in case college operations need to be fixed.

With this particular pattern, there is a huge advantage in figuring that out: women scientists can say why the published more or less in 2020 that previous and subsequent years. Getting up to a meaningful samples size would not be a problem in my department. Why are we only getting demographic data with a couple anecdotes that reinforce the investigators expectations when you could get real information.

What if the Covid pause caused people to realize that some of those pubs really are not that important, and that it is better to spend that time on something more meaingful? Still publish, but less fluff.

[Vkw10]

Coding an author's gender might be difficult. Gender, ethnicity, national origin, first language, etc, aren't usually included in article metadata.

I recently saw a poster at our undergraduate research day where a student's research was on demographics of executives in a certain field. The student had explained efforts undertaken to code demographic characteristics accurately, without making assumptions based on appearance or name. They had resorted to pronouns on websites and LinkedIn profiles for gender.

[Sun_Worshiper]

Coding an author's gender might be difficult. Gender, ethnicity, national origin, first language, etc, aren't usually included in article metadata.

I recently saw a poster at our undergraduate research day where a student's research was on demographics of executives in a certain field. The student had explained efforts undertaken to code demographic characteristics accurately, without making assumptions based on appearance or name. They had resorted to pronouns on websites and LinkedIn profiles for gender.

It is an interesting challenge. I just did a quick search in Google Scholar and there is published research out there on this topic, so presumably people have come up with ways to measure it, but I don't know if those measures are any good.

[Hegemony]

What if the Covid pause caused people to realize that some of those pubs really are not that important, and that it is better to spend that time on something more meaingful? Still publish, but less fluff.

If there's a gender differential, that's still important to look at. Maybe the women have decided to keep their eye on "things that matter more." But not getting tenure and losing their jobs is still a strong possibility for those who haven't published, so maybe instead of looking higher, they were just overwhelmed with caregiving. Because we know from work that's already been done that women, including academic women, were overwhelmed with caregiving during the pandemic years when daycares were closed and schools were remote. I haven't seen much work showing that they decided that life without tenure was "more meaningful" to them.

This does remind me of the old argument that "Women make less money because they set their sights on higher things." A convenient argument, for sure.