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1. Mind the Self-Promotion Gap: Gendered Perceptions and Responses to an Informational Intervention

   https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/ev5c9_v5  

   Bhat, Maalvika; Smirnova, Inna; Teplitskiy, Misha; Horvát, Emőke-Ágnes (May 2026, OSF)

   Promoting one’s research on social media has become an increasingly important part of academic careers, with implications for career advancement and the circulation of scientific knowledge. Prior research finds that men tend to self-promote their research papers more than women. This study draws on a survey of 3,111 U.S.-based academics to examine why this gender gap persists and experimentally test whether informing participants of the gap influences their intentions to self-promote in the future. We find that women are more likely than men to report reputational benefits (e.g., recognition, networking opportunities) but also higher interpersonal and professional costs (e.g., harassment, credibility loss, and time constraints). Men, by contrast, more often report skepticism about usefulness or audience presence as reasons for not self-promoting. Exposure to information about the gender gap is associated with significantly lower stated intentions among men to promote their next paper on social media. Women’s intentions, by contrast, remain unchanged, consistent with perceived costs of self-promotion, not lack of information about the gap, being the primary barrier among women. Overall, we conclude that increasing women’s intentions to self-promote their research requires systemic changes to evaluation criteria, anti-harassment infrastructure, and institutional support for public engagement. 

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2. Structure, status, and span: gender differences in co-authorship networks across 16 region-subject pairs (2009–2013)

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04885-1  

   Bunker_Whittington, Kjersten; King, Molly M; Cingolani, Isabella (January 2024, Scientometrics)

   Global and team science approaches are on the rise, as is attention to the network underpinnings of gender disparities in scientific collaboration. Many network studies of men’s and women’s collaboration rely on bounded case studies of single disciplines and/or single countries and limited measures related to the collaborative process. We deploy network analysis on the scholarly database Scopus to gain insight into gender inequity across regions and subject areas and to better understand contextual underpinnings of stagnancy. Using a dataset of over 1.2 million authors and 144 million collaborative relationships, we capture international and unbounded co-authorship networks that include intra- and inter-disciplinary co-authorship ties across time (2009–2013). We describe how gender informs structural features and status differences in network relationships, focusing on men and women authors in 16 region-subject pairs. We pay particular attention to how connected authors are (first- and second-order degree centrality), attributes of authors’ collaborative relationships (including the “quality” and other characteristics of these ties), tendencies towards gender homophily (proportion of same-gender ties), and the nature of men’s and women’s interdisciplinary and international reach. Men have more advantageous first-order connections, yet second-order collaborative profiles look more similar. Men and women exhibit homophilous attachment to authors of the same gender, consistent over time. There is notable variation in the level of gender disparity within subjects across countries. We discuss this variation in the context of global trends in men’s and women’s scientific participation and cultural- and country-level influences on the organization and production of science. 

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3. Matriliny reverses gender disparities in inflammation and hypertension among the Mosuo of China

   https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2014403117  

   Reynolds, Adam Z.; Wander, Katherine; Sum, Chun-Yi; Su, Mingjie; Emery Thompson, Melissa; Hooper, Paul L.; Li, Hui; Shenk, Mary K.; Starkweather, Kathrine E.; Blumenfield, Tami; et al (December 2020, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

   null (Ed.)

   Women experience higher morbidity than men, despite living longer. This is often attributed to biological differences between the sexes; however, the majority of societies in which these disparities are observed exhibit gender norms that favor men. We tested the hypothesis that female-biased gender norms ameliorate gender disparities in health by comparing gender differences in inflammation and hypertension among the matrilineal and patrilineal Mosuo of China. Widely reported gender disparities in health were reversed among matrilineal Mosuo compared with patrilineal Mosuo, due to substantial improvements in women’s health, with no concomitant detrimental effects on men. These findings offer evidence that gender norms limiting women’s autonomy and biasing inheritance toward men adversely affect the health of women, increasing women’s risk for chronic diseases with tremendous global health impact. 

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4. The gender gap in scholarly self-promotion on social media

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-60590-y  

   Peng, Hao; Teplitskiy, Misha; Romero, Daniel M; Horvát, Emőke-Ágnes (December 2025, Nature Communications)

   Self-promotion in science is ubiquitous but may not be exercised equally by everyone. Research on self-promotion in other domains suggests that, partly due to adverse reactions to non-gender-conforming career-enhancing behaviors, women tend to self-promote less often than men. We test whether this pattern extends to online spaces by examining scholarly self-promotion over six years using 23M tweets about 2.8M research papers authored by 3.5M scientists. We find that, overall, women are about 28% less likely than men to self-promote their papers on Twitter (now X) despite accounting for important confounds. The differential adoption of Twitter does not fully explain the gender gap in self-promotion, which is large even in relatively gender-balanced research areas, where adversity is expected to be smaller. Moreover, we find that the gender gap increases with higher performance and academic status, being most pronounced for research-prolific women from top-ranked institutions who publish papers in high-impact journals. We also find differential returns with respect to gender: while self-promotion is associated with increased tweets of papers compared to no self-promotion, the increase is slightly smaller for women than for men. Our findings reveal that scholarly self-promotion online varies meaningfully by gender and can contribute to a measurable gender gap in the visibility of scientific ideas. 

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5. Impact of gender on the formation and outcome of formal mentoring relationships in the life sciences

   https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001771  

   Schwartz, Leah P.; Liénard, Jean F.; David, Stephen V. (September 2022, PLOS Biology)

   Bero, Lisa (Ed.)

   Despite increasing representation in graduate training programs, a disproportionate number of women leave academic research without obtaining an independent position that enables them to train the next generation of academic researchers. To understand factors underlying this trend, we analyzed formal PhD and postdoctoral mentoring relationships in the life sciences during the years 2000 to 2020. Student and mentor gender are both associated with differences in rates of student’s continuation to positions that allow formal academic mentorship. Although trainees of women mentors are less likely to take on positions as academic mentors than trainees of men mentors, this effect is reduced substantially after controlling for several measurements of mentor status. Thus, the effect of mentor gender can be explained at least partially by gender disparities in social and financial resources available to mentors. Because trainees and mentors tend to be of the same gender, this association between mentor gender and academic continuation disproportionately impacts women trainees. On average, gender homophily in graduate training is unrelated to mentor status. A notable exception to this trend is the special case of scientists having been granted an outstanding distinction, evidenced by membership in the National Academy of Sciences, being a grantee of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, or having been awarded the Nobel Prize. This group of mentors trains men graduate students at higher rates than their most successful colleagues. These results suggest that, in addition to other factors that limit career choices for women trainees, gender inequities in mentors’ access to resources and prestige contribute to women’s attrition from independent research positions. 

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