Tamara Thomas

Urban Health Today

According to a study published in the American Psychologist, male researchers are more likely to be named as experts and rising stars in their field by their male colleagues than female researchers.In 2020, Dr. Veronica Yan and colleagues, the authors of this study, found a gender citation gap in the field of psychology despite over 70% of doctoral degrees in psychology being awarded to women within the last decades.&ldquo;For example, within the past 10 years, 75% of doctoral degrees in psychology have been conferred to women,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Go into any undergraduate psychology class, and it is mostly women. However, introductory psychology textbooks and curricula remain filled with &lsquo;classic&rsquo; studies that men mostly carry out. This is mainly due to academia historically being male-dominated, which is still reflected among those in the ranks of full professor [42% women] and emeritus professor [28% women],&rdquo; Dr. Yan Explained.For this new study titled I Forgot That You Existed: Role of Memory Accessibility in the Gender Citation Gap, Dr. Yan and the team investigated a possible explanation for the gender gap in citations where men are more referenced than women.&nbsp;&ldquo;We became interested in trying to understand the potential reasons why this citation gap could occur. One hypothesis we came up with is that it may be a difference in who comes to mind,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;An interesting aspect to this is that we sought to examine the bias in a specialty that in many ways may be considered female-dominated.&rdquo;To identify prominent researchers, Dr. Yan and team distributed a survey to faculty members in psychology departments across several R1 research institutions (defined as institutions with very high research activity) in the United States. Participants were asked to nominate up to 5 names they considered experts in their field and up to 5 rising stars (pre-tenure).The study suggests that male researcher&rsquo;s publications might receive more citations because men more readily recall their male colleagues&rsquo; work. This bias is evident when comparing the nominations of female experts. Women tend to nominate a number of female experts, which reflects the proportion of senior female faculty in R1 institutions. However, men nominated significantly fewer female experts than the actual number of women in the field.The study also found that male participants were less likely to nominate women as &ldquo;rising stars,&rdquo; while women were more likely to recognize other women as such.&nbsp;In addition, when listing experts and rising stars, men tended to place male names higher on their lists than female names. In contrast, women showed no bias in the order they listed experts or rising stars based on gender.The researchers found that men and women were equally likely to recognize the names of prominent researchers. However, they also noted that men were more likely to recall male researchers spontaneously, suggesting that who comes was top of mind and not necessarily a general awareness contributes to the gender citation gap.&ldquo;The silver lining in our findings is that the male bias is attenuated when male researchers were asked to name rising stars and when the researchers themselves are relatively junior,&rdquo; Yan said. &ldquo;Further, we did not find the male bias in the recall lists of our female participants. In fact, the women in our study overrepresented other women when asked to think of the rising stars &mdash; women were uplifting other women.&rdquo;Source: <a href="https://www.healio.com/news/hematology-oncology/20240627/women-experts-thought-of-less-often-vs-men-when-considering-rising-stars-in-medicine">Healio</a>Journal: <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Famp0001299">American Psychological Association</a>

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The study found that male researcher’s publications might receive more citations because men more readily recall their male colleagues’ work.