Abstract

Female researchers, on average, publish fewer articles and in journals of lower impact compared to men. A potential contributing factor is that women have smaller professional networks, potentially due to the lack of networking opportunities. Descriptive statistics indicate that women have fewer collaborators and are less central within their networks. This paper analyses whether women have a different propensity to form new connections, exploiting a large scale natural experiment across all disciplines in Italian academia. I exploit exogenous variation in the networking opportunities available to Professors, stemming from some pairs of researchers randomly being drawn to sit on the same committee, while other pairs are not. I find that researchers who sit on the same committee are more likely to collaborate on future projects in STEM fields, with new joint publications getting published as soon as 3 years after the initial shock. While I find no gender differences in the propensity to form new co-authorships, I observe that women in STEM change the gender composition of their networks. Female researchers substitute away from female collaborators in favour of men. Point estimates suggest that female researchers, optimise by substituting a new female collaborator for 3/4 males. Through these new connections, women become significantly more central within their networks, increasing their visibility. Although the estimated impacts are not as large as previous literature suggests, my results show that establishing new connections increases quality of future publications. The evidence suggests that providing women with more networking opportunities may help in decreasing the gender productivity gap.

Citation

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