Gender-specific favoritism in science

Abstract

Is the strength of favoritism from social ties gender-dependent? Collecting election data of the most distinguished Chinese scientific academies over a decade, we find favoritism from some social connections, such as sharing a hometown, college, or employer, between recruiters and candidates, can benefit men more than women. These results are robust to conservative econometrics specifications, alternative measures of social connections, quality of peer candidates, and gender composition of recruitment teams. As a result, women need better objective scientific achievements to succeed; most of this gender disparity is attributed to gender-specific favoritism. These results indicate the existence of gender imparity after controlling for social connections.