Why Don’t Women Publish as Much as Men?

Check out the list of the most frequently cited scholars in economics, and you’ll notice that there’s one thing missing: women. The same holds true for biochemistry, higher education, and just about any other discipline you care to name.

Nine times out of 10, the most frequently cited scholars are the most prolific, too. The logical deduction: The most-productive people in academe are men.

Say that in a roomful of female humanities professors, and you’re likely to be buried under a barrage of curriculum vitae.

When asked about women who crank it out, colleagues are quick to name names: Sandra M. Gilbert, an English professor at the University of California at Davis (23 books); Mary Beth Norton, a historian at Cornell University (10 books); Patricia Meyer Spacks, an English professor at the University of Virginia (16 books) -- and that’s just the short list.

“It’s classic. There are women who publish a lot, but somehow they get overlooked,” says Elaine Showalter, an English professor at Princeton University and no slouch herself (eight books and “a review or article a week, or more,” she says).

But those numbers pale when stacked up against the prose cranked out by Sander Gilman, for example. The Germanic-studies scholar at the University of Chicago has turned out 50 books. And he’s not the only man who has done so.

People raise plenty of quibbles and caveats about the numbers: The statistics measure quantity, not quality. The numbers focus on citation lists, which don’t always include the names of the most influential scholars in a field (although they usually do). And the academics who study faculty productivity typically ignore the humanities, where women abound. Instead of examining who’s publishing the most books, researchers look at who’s publishing the most journal articles, something that’s more commonly quantified. That approach privileges the sciences over the humanities, in which books, not articles, are the mainstay of publishing.

That said, the numbers speak for themselves, and they speak pretty loudly. According to the most recent data gathered by the University of California at Los Angeles’s Higher Education Research Institute -- figures from 1989 -- about 43 per cent of women at all types of colleges and in all types of disciplines have never published a single journal article. That’s true of only 23 per cent of their male counterparts. At universities, the gap narrows, but only slightly: 20 per cent of women have never published, compared with 7 per cent of men.

The numbers at the prolific end of the spectrum are equally skewed. Only 0.7 per cent of women at all institutions, and 2 per cent of women at universities, have published 51 or more journal articles. Compare that with the 6 per cent of men at all types of institutions, and 14 per cent at universities, who are high-end producers.

Most professors fall in the middle of the pack and are writing roughly the same amount, regardless of their sex, says Elizabeth G. Creamer, an associate professor of women’s studies at Virginia Tech and the author of Assessing Faculty Publication Productivity (ERIC Clearinghouse on Higher Education, 1998). “But when you look at the high end of the scale -- the top 3 per cent of producers -- even in fields where women have been awarded the majority of Ph.D.'s for a long time, the lists are almost entirely male.”

That might be changing. The gap in productivity between male and female scientists is closing, according to a new study by Yu Xie, a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan, and Kimberlee A. Shauman, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California at Davis. In the 1960s and ‘70s, female scientists published 60 per cent as much as their male colleagues. In the 1980s and ‘90s, they’re writing 75 to 80 per cent as much.

“This is a very radical finding,” says Mr. Xie, who will publish the results soon with Ms. Shauman in the American Sociological Review. “Even when we don’t control for anything -- even if we don’t take into account age, rank, or field -- the raw gap in productivity between men and women has declined significantly.”

And when Mr. Xie and Ms. Shauman did control for those differences, the gap disappeared entirely. “All things being equal, women are just as productive as men,” he says.

There’s just one catch, he notes: All things aren’t equal.

Trying to figure out why women write less than men is like searching for a smoking gun on a firing range. There is no single Cause. “It’s as if every characteristic of the prolific scholar -- and I mean every one -- is not generally a characteristic of women,” Ms. Creamer says.

Topping the list of explanations: More women work in jobs in which publishing is an anomaly. They’re toiling at teaching colleges or in non-tenured slots at universities. That’s the kiss of death for most publishing careers.

Women often end up in those jobs because they tend to be slower out of the starting gate. In fact, they’re 50 per cent more likely than men to take 11 years or more to earn their bachelor’s and doctoral degrees, says Mr. Xie. The reasons have been repeated so often that they sound like cliches: Women are putting their husbands through school, interrupting their careers to follow spouses who’ve found jobs elsewhere, and getting derailed by child-bearing and child-rearing responsibilities.

Judee K. Burgoon, a communications professor at the University of Arizona, didn’t let anything slow her down. She’s written eight books and 180 articles -- evidence, she jokes, of “a misspent youth.”

“I finished my Ph.D. when I was 24,” she says, calling the breakneck pace “insanity.” But, she notes, “it gave me an early start. A lot of my cohort didn’t have the same opportunities to plunge in.”

Helen S. Astin, a professor of higher education at U.C.L.A. who has written about gender and publishing, knows what Ms. Burgoon is talking about. “I had eight years when I didn’t publish anything -- even my dissertation,” says Ms. Astin, who was raising two children. “I was following my husband in his career.”

It worked -- at least for him. Alexander W. Astin, also a professor of higher education at U.C.L.A., is the most frequently cited scholar in his field. His wife has yet to break into the top 10, although she’s now a major player, too.

Once in graduate school, women complain, they have a tougher time finding senior scholars to be mentors. Female academics recount all sorts of stories -- like the economics-department committee that took a year to read the first draft of a woman’s dissertation, or the chemistry professor who palmed off his female advisee on a postdoctoral student.

Such neglect can put the kibosh on a promising career, says Virginia P. Richmond, a professor of communication studies at West Virginia University. Her mentor, by comparison, “told me that he wouldn’t sign off on my graduation until I had something in press from my dissertation. After that, publishing became an integral part of my career.” Her record to date: nine books, 52 articles.

What’s more, women frequently receive less credit than men do for articles written with senior scholars. Men are seen as independent contributors, says Ms. Creamer, but people assume that female co-authors are “just doing the typing.”

Things get even dicier for women who write with their husbands. Gillian R. Knapp, a Princeton astrophysicist, wrote 10 of her 200 articles with her husband, James Gunn, who is in her department. “There is a feeling that I wouldn’t have got where I am but for him, that I’m riding on his coattails,” she says. “People assume that he had the best ideas. In fact, he had most of them -- but not all.”

Ms. Creamer can identify. She has published articles on higher education with her more-established husband, Donald Creamer, an education professor at Virginia Tech, and she was lead author on half of them. He’s been invited to speak on the topic many times. She’s still waiting to be asked.

Then there’s the thorny issue of workload. If you want to know why male professors have more time to think deep thoughts and write them down, look at the division of labor in the average university department, women suggest. Female academics insist that they do more teaching, more advising, and more administrative work than the bulk of their male colleagues do.

Few people -- even men -- dispute the inordinate amount of committee work that women are expected to do, a phenomenon that one female economics professor calls “being tokened to death.”

While there are exceptions, “the men who do committee work are at the bottom of the productivity level. You don’t usually find the top guns doing it,” says Michael Burgoon, a professor in the University of Arizona’s medical school and communications department. But women, he notes, get pressured to do it all the time.

Moreover, many potentially prolific women get siphoned off into administrative posts, says his wife, Judee, the communications professor. “People find it easier to work their way up in administration” than through scholarship, she explains, adding that she thinks administrative work is a “time suck” and is glad she has avoided it.

What women can’t avoid, they themselves say, is coming up empty-handed when departmental goodies are divvied up. That argument makes some men snort, but female academics insist that many of their male colleagues get the secretaries, course relief, graduate assistants, grants, and big labs -- and women don’t.

“Women still tend to be the caretakers, while the men are the taken-care-of,” says Ms. Showalter, the Princeton professor of English. Part of the problem, she says, is that administrators still think that the kind of support women prefer is time spent at a leafy institute, surrounded by other women, “rather than a nice little office full of people helping you do your work. The nature of support for men -- computers, time off, research budgets, people who can do some of the legwork for you -- is much more empowering.” She wouldn’t mind some of that “empowerment” herself, but says that a number of her requests were turned down.

Marjorie Perloff, a humanities professor at Stanford University, agrees with the explanations -- to a point -- but thinks that they’re sometimes used as excuses. “It’s easier to go to a meeting or run a committee and sit around and say, ‘We don’t have enough mentors,’ but it’s a sign of weakness,” she says. “You have to rely on yourself. I don’t think men sit around having constant conversations about how they need more mentoring.”

The idea that marriage wreaks havoc on most women’s vitae is another myth that scholars are quick to puncture. Married women are more productive than the unattached women working in their departments, says Harriet Zuckerman, a senior vice-president at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and a former sociologist at Columbia University. In fact, her research shows that female professors with as many as four children are just as prolific as those who are childless.

The most prolific women are those married to other academics, whether or not they publish together. The same isn’t true of men married to female scholars, though. They’re less prolific than their colleagues with non-academic wives, says U.C.L.A.'s Ms. Astin.

Academic husbands understand the demands and deadlines that female scholars face, and are more willing to share the household chores, instead of dickering over who picks up the drycleaning, their wives say.

Besides, a scholarly spouse can open doors as well as make dinner. Marianne A. Ferber, a professor emerita of economics and women’s studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was married to an established economist, the late Robert Ferber. “He was a great asset to me, even though we didn’t publish together,” she says. “When we would go to the economics meetings together, my husband knew all the big shots.” When it comes to publishing, she explains, “who you know matters as much as what you know.” She has written six books and some 80 articles.

Despite the pluses of having an academic spouse, however, most female scholars say they still shoulder the bulk of the burden at home. “Women have less time than men,” says Ms. Perloff. “They have a lot of other responsibilities. That’s the dirty little secret.”

Her way of dealing: finding other people to do some of the work for her. She has spent a lot of time playing with her children, but not cooking or cleaning, she says. When she learned that the public-school kindergarten lasted only from noon to 3 p.m., she enrolled her daughters in a private school, where kindergarten ran from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. “If they hadn’t gone to summer camp from age 8 on, I never would have got anything done,” she says.

Of course, none of those “necessities” would have been possible without money. “It certainly made a difference to me,” says Ms. Perloff, who is married to a physician. She has published 10 books and almost 200 articles.

For many women, the talk about productivity seems slightly misplaced. “Men might be going for long vitae,” an endeavor ripe for phallic metaphors, quips Barbara F. Reskin, a sociologist at Harvard University. But long vitae don’t always lead to good scholarship, she says. “We call it ‘salami science.’ You keep cutting it up into thinner slices, publishing variations of the same thing.”

She may be on to something. Female scientists are more likely to take a “low quantity, high quality” approach to publishing, says Gerhard Sonnert, a research associate in physics at Harvard. He and Gerald Holton, a professor emeritus of physics and the history of science there, studied the publishing records of male and female scientists. The male scientists tried to maximize their output by publishing their research in as many chunks as possible, Mr. Sonnert says. The women invested their energy in one big piece, rechecking their facts and reworking the writing.

“It’s so hard to be accepted and to be ‘one of the boys’ that you absolutely don’t want to fail,” Ms. Reskin says. “That’s why women run 17 tests. If we’re wrong, we might not be forgiven.”

Barbara J. Grosz, a professor of computer science at Harvard, won’t sign her name to an article unless she’s done some of the research and some of the writing. Not everybody subscribes to the same philosophy, she says. Lots of scientists tack their name onto every paper churned out by their research group: “They’re doing 1 per cent of what a woman does, but they’re getting more credit for it.”

Given the barriers that women face, says Ms. Creamer, the Virginia Tech professor, it’s discriminatory to judge people’s productivity on the basis of how much they’ve published. “Some people say these are objective measures. I don’t think so,” she argues. “How do you say that someone who writes three articles a year is more productive than someone teaching five classes? The word ‘productivity’ is used against people as if they’re lying around doing nothing.”

Some people are, says Arizona’s Michael Burgoon. He acknowledges that women shoulder more responsibilities at home and might have a harder time tapping into networks of established scholars. He also agrees that publishing should not be the sole measure of a scholar’s productivity (noting in passing that he’s written more than 200 articles and 15 books).

That said, however, he finds most of the other explanations for the gender gap in publishing a lot of hooey: “The only people who question the objectivity of publications as a sign of productivity are people with short vitae.” He’s heard the same tired arguments from men and women alike, he says. “The truth is that the people who write more and publish more, and who are prolific leaders in their field, just happen to be smarter and harder-working than these other people.”

Besides, he adds, “whether it’s an objective index or not, it’s still one that others aspire to.”

He’s right. For all their complaints about quantity, women still want to see their names -- and the names of other female scholars -- on the roster of the most-productive scholars. “I want to be on the list,” says Harvard’s Ms. Reskin, who writes a book every four years and keeps trimming her vitae to keep it to 10 pages. “The people whose names are on the list are the gatekeepers for their discipline. They are the insiders. It matters to have more women there.”

Other prolific female scholars agree, but many said they could not take time out for an interview.

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