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The Publication Gender Gap in Developmental Psychology

Sat, March 23, 12:45 to 2:15pm, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 3, Room 323

Integrative Statement

Despite radical changes in equal rights policies over the past fifty years, women continue to be significantly underrepresented in the academic sciences, including psychology, where women make up over three-quarters of undergraduate and graduate psychology students, but only a third of all full professors. Here, we use freely available publication records to describe nuanced patterns in how men and women contribute to academic psychology, examining differences in authorship positions and citations across time. While previous work has analyzed large-scale publication records for gender disparities in social and hard sciences (Laviere et al., 2013), we report on nuanced patterns within psychology in general and developmental psychology in particular.

We used the R RISMed Package to scrape and index the open PubMed database for all publications in 130 highest-impact peer-reviewed psychology journals since 2003. Of these, 14 journals were classified as Developmental Psychology journals (e.g., Developmental Science, Infancy), making up over 16,000 unique publications. To determine author gender, we classified authors by comparing the first name of each author to openly available census data, successfully classifying over 87% of all authors as male or female.

We found evidence for a publication and citation gender gap in psychology: female authors are less published and less cited than their male counterparts across all authorship positions, journals with a higher impact-factor are more dominated by male authors, and women are less likely than men to advance to senior authorship positions over time. These trends hold even when controlling for the university affiliations that first-authors hold, the journals in which authors choose to publish, the number of co-authors, and by the subfield-specific rates of publishing.

Most importantly, developmental psychology is no outlier: while 92.5% of the masters and doctorate degrees in developmental psychology are awarded to women (U.S. Department of Education, 2016), our analyses show that female authors represent 57.44% of authors in developmental psychology journals, and that women are significantly less cited even when controlling for this lower number of publications. Moreover, while 63.1% of first authors are women, only 51.44% of last authors (typically the senior position) are women. Longitudinal analyses also show that women also take longer to move from first to last authorship in developmental journals: 8.26 years compared to 3.65 years for men (Figure 1). These patterns suggest an attrition of women from graduate school onward within developmental psychology.

As one silver lining, we find that, compared to other subfields, developmental psychology has been showing a promising trend over time, with linear slopes indicating an elimination of a gender gap even in the last author position since 2010 (Figure 2). However, because 90% of graduate students in developmental psychology are women, the gender of authors is still extremely disproportionate. Indeed, the large percent of women in developmental psychology makes the disparities in citations and movement to senior authorship more discouraging. By continuing to track publication gaps in our field as cultural norms and structural practices change, we can better assess our progress in reaching gender equity.

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