Are Referees and Editors in Economics Gender Neutral?*
By David Card, Stefano DellaVigna, Patricia Funk, Nagore Iriberri. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2019
268 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We study the role of gender in the evaluation of economic research using submissions to four leading journals. We find that referee gender has no effect on the relative assessment of female- versus male-authored papers, suggesting that any differential biases of male referees are negligible. To determine whether referees as a whole impose different standards for female authors, we compare citations for female- and male-authored papers, holding constant referee evaluations and other characteristics. We find that female-authored papers receive about 25% more citations than observably similar male-authored papers. Editors largely follow the referees, resulting in a 1.7 percentage point lower probability of a revise and resubmit verdict for papers with female authors relative to a citation-maximizing benchmark. In their desk rejection decisions, editors treat female authors more favorably, though they still impose a higher bar than would be implied by citation maximization. We find no differences in the informativeness of female versus male referees or in the weight that editors place on the recommendations of female versus male referees. We also find no differences in editorial delays for female- versus male-authored papers.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Decision Sciences, Safety Research
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0be4ea201466ab1a5c7029d658e664dc4074c036
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Economics and Econometrics
In Safety Research
Citations in the corpus
- Men, women and STEM: Why the differences and what should be done? (2020, result): “…some studies find higher journal-article acceptance rates for men, studies that control for factors such as publication record and academic rank have generally found either no sex differences (e.g. Blank, 1991; Card et al., 2020) or higher acceptance rates for women (e.g. Lerback & Hanson, 2017).”
- Beliefs about Gender (2019, unknown): “For art and sports, this prior was informed by the study of Coffman (2014), which found observed performance differences and consistent perception gaps in her sample. Our priors for verbal and math are guided by observed gender differences on large-scale standardized tests such as the SAT.(5) Neuros”