The Intergenerational Transmission of Gendered Visibility Gaps in Knowledge Work

Abstract This study examines whether gendered visibility gaps transmit across professional generations through mentorship. We argue that women mentors may provide developmental support equivalent to men mentors yet connect mentees to communities with more limited reach. Newcomers gain visibility through mentor-linked audiences, and these inherited audiences can shape the visibility of mentees’ independent contributions over time. Studying mentor–mentee relationships in science, we find that mentees of women receive fewer citations than mentees of men for comparable work, including for work produced without the mentor. This gap is concentrated in the mentor-linked audience and is stronger when mentees collaborate frequently with mentors and remain close to the mentors’ intellectual domain. The findings show how gendered visibility gaps propagate through mentorship via audience inheritance to the next generation.