A higher standard for women

Abstract

Gender Bias Despite the absence of explicit gender bias among journal editors and reviewers, female economists were held to a higher standard in order to publish their work. Four leading economics journals shared data on nearly 30,000 manuscripts with Card et al. , who found that author gender did not influence key aspects of the evaluation process. However, when looking at future citations as a proxy for the quality of the research, female-authored papers received 25% more citations than similarly evaluated male-authored papers, suggesting that women needed to produce higher quality work than men in order for referees to recommend publication. Quart. J. Econ. 135 , 269 (2020).