Participation in Post-Publication Comments: A Gender Gap

Scientists advance knowledge by criticizing and debating ideas. Women have historically made up a minority of participants in academic science, but, have they been missing even more in the debate component of science? I shed light on this question by studying male and female rates of authorship of post-publication comments, a type of paper that directly criticizes someone else's published work. Across a range of disciplines in the natural and social sciences, the share of female authors is 20-40 percent lower for post-publication comments relative to regular papers. This imbalance in the literature is not explained by gender disparities in sorting across fields, seniority, coauthorship propensity, or strategies that prioritize impactful papers. I then conduct an experiment that suggests a role of gender differences in preferences for pointing out a mistake in someone’s work and taking away credit earned from that mistake.