The publication gender gap in psychology.

Abstract

Women are notably underrepresented in the academic sciences. Psychology is a pertinent case study of gender inequality in science, because women make up over three quarters of undergraduate and graduate students but only a third of all full professors. Here, publication records from 125 high-impact, peer-reviewed psychology journals are analyzed to describe nuanced patterns about how men and women contribute to research psychology. To determine gender, we classified over 750,000 authors on 200,000 unique publications by comparing the 1st name of each author to openly available census data. The data replicate previous reports of publication and citation gender gaps in psychology and significantly extend these results by showing that these gaps are persistent across subdiscipline and time but are mediated by various contextual factors. For example, although the size of the publication and citation gaps are not explained by the university affiliation of the authors' and frequency of coauthorship, the gaps are larger in high-impact journals and at the last-author position. These patterns have remained largely unchanged since at least 2003. These results provide a detailed look at the variety of factors contributing to the differences in how men and women publish in research psychology and provide free and openly available tools for assessing publication and citation differences across time, journals, and other academic disciplines. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).