Fresh out of a doctorate program, Jane is a proud graduate in the life sciences faculty, joining the ranks of many other women on stage. In this era, the gender gap in science is increasingly narrow and Jane is proud to be part of the pool of female researchers closing this gap.
She dreamed of this moment—the future of experiments and lab research is finally here and perhaps, she could spearhead an experiment with her own research team.
Unfortunately, the statistics are against Jane, as only one in four female researchers get a full professorship in a research university.
If Jane is expecting a more competitive salary after the doctorate, that will happen—only if you don’t compare it to men, as empirical evidence showed that there are significant differences.
Women also typically receive less credit for citations and funding, as a 2018 study shows.
Research has even suggested that women, in general, receive less recognition than men, even if the achievements are equivalent.
The big question is this: why?
With more scientific publications published each day, the number of life science articles published per year has reached a staggering one million threshold—it comes with poverty of attention.
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To make sure scientists allocate time to read their articles, authors have to self-promote through different avenues, be it through social media or presentations. This way, grants, and salaries are much easier to obtain; such resources are typically scarce in the research world.
With resources being so scarce, statistics are showing that women have an even smaller chance of obtaining any of them, relative to men.
Fortunately, there is a core reason, as Marc J. Lerchenmueller and his co-authors Olav Sorenson and Anupam B. Jena discovered in their study: women used positive words to describe their work less frequently than men.
Self-promotion gap amongst academics
Researchers often use positive words in their abstracts and subtitles in an attempt to get the eyeball of a gleaning scientist. Words like “novel”, “unique” and “excellent” are part of the norm. There are times where you can get phrases like “promising result” and “groundbreaking research”.
The study discovered that articles written by female junior researchers and female principal investigators were 21 per cent less likely to use positive terms.
In fact, their research is more likely to be framed as it is: no additional self-promotion and nothing exaggerated. Though both men and women use such words throughout history, women were shown to be using them much infrequently.
The consequences were severe for women: authors that did not self-promote received less attention, especially when they were published in the more prominent journals.
Hence, the gender gap appears—in fact, the study suggested that women gained confidence as they rose to senior ranks, which thus caused the gender disparity to disappear at the most senior levels.
Self-promotion gap at work
Some may argue that the aforementioned study only describes a unique situation: it pertains to the life sciences sector, and particularly on female researchers and scientists.
To extrapolate and have it represent the self-promotion gap in other careers would be too much of a stretch—unless you are referring to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which found that women also constantly self-promote less at work.
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The statistic corroborates with Lerchenmueller’s study; men rated their performance 33 per cent higher than women who performed at equivalent levels.
In the study, 1500 Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers answered 20 analytical questions on mathematics and science. They were asked to predict how many questions they got correct (to measure their confidence) and asked four subjective questions that typically appear in a performance review (to measure how much they self-promote). The study found:
- When women were told that their answer to a self-promotion question will be communicated to an employer for them to determine whether to hire and how much to pay, women self-promoted less.
- If there was no financial incentive to the self-promotion question, men and women both decreased their self-promotion levels equally—thus the gender gap still persists.
- When told that there might be a chance employers would learn about their true performance in addition to their self-promotion, women still self-promoted less.
- When told about the average level of self-promotion of others, women still did the same.
The persistent gap indicated that women self-promoted less systematically. In every situation, women would generally self-promote less as compared to equally-performing men.
The question rises up again: why?
