A fresh look at the publication and citation gap between men and women: insights from economics and political science

Recent years have seen efforts to attract more women into academia and to support their careers. We ask: Is there still a gap in the number of publications between men and women in the social sciences at the individual level? To answer this question, we created a novel dataset of publications and citations by economists and political scientists at the top 50 universities worldwide. We then compare the individual publication and citation patterns of female and male scholars. Our results illustrate that the publication gap between the sexes in economics and political science appears still strong. In other words, our results still indicate that men publish many more articles and receive more citations than women do. We also provide evidence that male full professors, who are numerically the largest category in the universities we study, seem to drive this gap.