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When Claudia Goldin received her Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, she was only the third woman to receive the award, after Esther Duflo (2019) and Elinor Ostrom (2009). It was the first time in the history of the 54-year-old prize that women held more Nobels in economics than the uncles of Larry Summers (Paul Samuelson and Kenneth Arrow). An anecdote, but it illustrates the level of representation of women in economics.

There is a growing body of (economic) research on gender differences in academia. Notably, female economists tend to be held to higher standards in leading journals as measured in citations. The results are in line with recent work by Erin Hengel, who shows how papers by female economists spend longer in peer review.

Based on the assumption of equal ability among men and women (on average), women (have to) devote more time to writing their papers to reach a higher standard to get through the peer review than men have to reach. This, in turn, implies a lower output relative to their male colleagues and ties in with the finding that among professors in psychology, women benefit more from their papers (in terms of academic progression) than men. On the other hand, it may simply reflect that the work of females has to be at a higher standard.

Female researchers, especially those at the start of their careers, have weaker networks. These ties again play a large role in the chances of being accepted in a journal, as personal friends who serve on editorial boards are a major boost in acceptance probability.

Rejecting unfair or exploitative publishers

All things being equal, requiring higher standards and having weaker ties implies that women have a steeper hill to climb to publish their work in leading journals. However, in economics and adjacent fields, women are not only disadvantaged by these external factors, but also because they seem to consciously choose to publish less often with publishers they consider unfair or exploitative.

In a new paper, my co-authors and I come to this conclusion following a significant two-fold “natural experiment”. This occurred when, on the one hand, publishing in Springer Nature and Wiley journals became more attractive due to uncomplicated and free open access (for authors at German institutions). And on the other, Elsevier cut off researchers at German institutions from the most recent issues of its journals.

What happened? In an attempt to foster open science and tackle ever-rising journal subscription costs, German research libraries and institutions started to negotiate so-called transformative agreements with the leading academic publishers John Wiley & Sons, Springer Nature and Elsevier.

But while negotiations with the former two proceeded favourably, bargaining with Elsevier hit an impasse, leading to both sides accusing the other of collapsing the negotiations.

Consequently, German research institutions ended their subscriptions and lost access to new Elsevier publications. All things being equal, Springer Nature and Wiley journals became more attractive and Elsevier journals lost their attractiveness. Other publishers, such as Taylor & Francis, SAGE or OUP, remained unaffected, but became relatively less or more attractive.

The journals, of course, proceeded as before, notwithstanding some researchers who stepped down from editorial boards. While the access restrictions were easy to circumvent using working paper versions, reaching out to the authors or using predatory repositories, the blocked access was a permanent reminder for researchers that the publisher disagreed on terms and conditions in favour of easy access. This may have led researchers to question whether they should continue publishing their work with Elsevier.

In stark contrast to such considerations stands the personal cost-benefit trade-off for the individual academic. While it might be beneficial to shift away from some publishers for the discipline as a whole, individual incentives are different: the well-established incumbent journals have often gained high impact factors and other favourable metrics. Shifting to alternatives may have led, in some cases, to a downgrade in the evaluation of one’s own work.

Our analysis shows women were more likely to actually execute this opting out, while men were significantly more reluctant. One example of these differences between men and women is the shift away from publishing in Elsevier journals after the cut-off in Germany took place. One can see that equally mixed teams, mostly female and fully female research groups (one to four authors) are significantly less likely than fully male groups to shift away from the publisher.

Impact on career progression

While this behaviour shows women appear to support the public good of open science more than their male colleagues do, it may also have harmed their careers at the same time. In economics, the journal where you publish your articles is closely linked to career progression. It is an influential factor in hiring decisions and the awarding of research grants.

In economics, so-called ‘top five’ journals are in the hands of society and university presses. But outside these ‘top five’, Elsevier hosts important general interest and field journals that are often essential highlights on résumés. Removing these journals from one’s own set of outlets to be considered for submission strategies negatively alters choice set in terms of journal reputation.

We will see in the future what this means for gender diversity in the discipline. Furthermore, it remains an open question whether a wider dispersal of influential research across journals may change the discipline’s strongly hierarchical ranking of them. One upside of the general focus on prestige, however, might be the relatively low share of obscure papers stemming from paper mills in economics.

So, in total, the current state of the discipline is a double-edged sword: The strong focus on prestigious journals may lift up quality in several dimensions, but comes at the cost of the strong market power of these journals (which hinders competition) and career penalties for those who try to take different paths when it comes to publishing their work.

W Benedikt Schmal is a research group lead in economic policy at Walter Eucken Institute in Freiburg (Br.) in Germany. He is also a PhD candidate at the Duesseldorf Institute for Competition Economics at Heinrich Heine University in Duesseldorf, Germany. His main research focus is set on the economics of science, mainly on competition in the academic publishing market. Further research interests lie in the nexus of industrial organisation and institutional governance applied to collusive agreements in business cartels. This article draws on the author’s co-authored paper, The role of gender and co-authors in academic publication behaviour, published in Research Policy. This article is republished from the LSE Social Science Blog. The original is here. It gives the views and opinions of the authors and does not reflect the views and opinions of the Impact of Social Science blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.