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Comment by seunosewa | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious about the data for women who published papers with other women. That will tell us whether the issue is that men tend to get most of the credit for collaborative work done with women, or something else.

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The article seems to address that in the second chart. When a woman publishes with only women they get the 9% bump they're supposed to. When they publish with a mixed-gender group they get only 4%, and when they publish with only men they get almost no benefit. Is this what you were asking?

I wonder if they controlled for age in this study. Women in the sciences are younger than men (on average), so a dual-female paper is more likely to be from two contemporaries, while a dual-male paper could more easily be from an old prof and a young one. From what I've seen, the more established author tends to get more of the credit/prestige, even though the less-established one tends to do more of the work.

Age doesn't appear to be in the pdf. A surprising omission.

http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/sarsons/files/gender_groupw...

That does seem very flawed. If there's a strong correlation between gender and age in the field then why would that be not accounted for? I can definitely see people assuming the older person was the brains/leader of a project.

> while a dual-male paper could more easily be from an old prof and a young one.

So the best case to check if this is true is the reverse, an older female prof with a younger male.

The story seems to be that when Janet writes with George, her colleagues infer that George deserves the credit. That might be a reasonable inference if women were more likely to join research collaborations as the junior partner, but in fact Ms. Sarsons finds that they are less likely to do this.

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