PDRI-DevLab is hosting a Spring 2024 Workshop Series featuring its staff and affiliates.
Topic: Does the Hidden College Contribute to a Gender Gap in Academic Success? A Pre-Analysis Plan
Presenter: Guy Grossman (joint with Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon, William Dinneen, Irene Tang, Shunning Ge)
Session Details: Across disciplines, a gender gap in academic success— measured as the number of publications, journal placement, and citation counts —has long been documented. A parallel Scientometrics literature has documented the substantial importance of embeddedness in informal professional networks for academic success, using acknowledgments in publications as novel measures of such embeddedness. Combining these hitherto disjoint strands of research on the determinants of academic success, we investigate 1) the effect of embeddedness in informal collaboration networks on academic success; 2) whether gender differences in network embeddedness exist; and ultimately 3) the extent to which informal collaboration network embeddedness can account for gender gaps in academic success. To examine the above questions, we collected detailed information on 30,186 unique scholars (including both authors and commentors) from 17,711 peer-reviewed articles published in 31 political science journals from 2010 to 2021. We construct network measures at both the ego-centric and meso-scale levels to capture scholars’ positions in political science’s informal collaboration network. We conduct both descriptive and statistical analysis for hypothesis testing. With this work, we improve our understanding of academic gender disparities as well as of the gendered nature of network embeddedness as a correlate of academic success.
This session will be a workshop and participants are requested to read the Pre-Analysis Plan beforehand.
For more information, reach out to pdri-devlab@sas.upenn.edu.
Guy Grossman is a professor at the Political Science department at the University of Pennsylvania, and the co-director of Penn’s Development Research Initiative (PDRI-DevLab). An applied political economist, Grossman’s substantive focus is on governance, migration and forced displacement, human trafficking, and conflict processes, (mostly) in the context of developing countries.
