[Paper Review] Gender Inequality in Research Productivity During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Ruomeng Cui, Hao Ding+1 more|arXiv (Cornell University)|Jun 17, 2020

COVID-19 epidemiological studies41 references54 citations

TL;DR

The paper quantifies how COVID-19 lockdowns amplified gender gaps in social-science research productivity, using a large SSRN preprint dataset and a difference-in-differences approach.

ABSTRACT

We study the disproportionate impact of the lockdown as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak on female and male academics' research productivity in social science. The lockdown has caused substantial disruptions to academic activities, requiring people to work from home. How this disruption affects productivity and the related gender equity is an important operations and societal question. We collect data from the largest open-access preprint repository for social science on 41,858 research preprints in 18 disciplines produced by 76,832 authors across 25 countries over a span of two years. We use a difference-in-differences approach leveraging the exogenous pandemic shock. Our results indicate that, in the 10 weeks after the lockdown in the United States, although the total research productivity increased by 35%, female academics' productivity dropped by 13.9% relative to that of male academics. We also show that several disciplines drive such gender inequality. Finally, we find that this intensified productivity gap is more pronounced for academics in top-ranked universities, and the effect exists in six other countries. Our work points out the fairness issue in productivity caused by the lockdown, a finding that universities will find helpful when evaluating faculty productivity. It also helps organizations realize the potential unintended consequences that can arise from telecommuting.

Motivation & Objective

• Assess whether the COVID-19 lockdown widened the gender productivity gap among social science researchers.
• Identify heterogeneity of the effect by academic rank, university ranking, and country.
• Provide evidence to inform policy and evaluation practices for telecommuting and productivity.
• Contribute to literature on productivity, social operations, and gender equity in academia.

Proposed method

• Use SSRN preprints (41,858 papers, 76,832 authors, 25 countries) to measure weekly productivity by gender.
• Infer authors' gender from first names (Genderize) and manual web checks when below 80% confidence.
• Define effective productivity as 1/n for n authors per multi-author preprint."
• Apply difference-in-differences (DID) with discipline fixed effects and time fixed effects to estimate the impact of lockdown on female vs. male productivity.
• Aggregate analyses at discipline level and country level; validate parallel trends pre-lockdown and test robustness across time windows.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 Did the US lockdown increase the productivity gap between female and male researchers in social sciences?
• RQ2 Is the effect stronger for certain ranks (e.g., assistant professors) or institutions (top-ranked universities)?
• RQ3 Does the gap vary across countries beyond the US?
• RQ4 Do changes in productivity come with changes in paper quality as measured by downloads/views?

Key findings

• During the 10 weeks after US lockdown, female academics’ productivity declined by 13.2% relative to male academics.
• Overall US productivity rose by 35% post-lockdown, driven mainly by male authors.
• The intensified gap is larger among assistant professors and at top-ranked universities, and is observed in six other countries.
• Quality measures (downloads/views) of papers did not change by gender.
• The results are robust across discipline and aggregate (country-level) analyses.