Gender differences in recognition for group work

Abstract

We study whether gender influences credit attribution for group work using observational data and two experiments. We use data from academic economists to test whether coauthorship matters differently for tenure for men and women. We find that conditional on quality and other observables, men are tenured similarly regardless of whether they coauthor or solo-author. Women, however, are less likely to receive tenure the more they coauthor. We then conduct two experiments that demonstrate that biases in credit attribution in settings without confounds exist. Taken together, our results are best explained by gender and stereotypes influencing credit attribution for group work.