Men are more likely to promote themselves and their work, and studies suggest that helps their careers
“LEAN IN,” ADVISES Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, in a book of that name. Her advice to women—be more assertive to grab influence at work, rather than waiting for it to be offered—was met with scorn by some feminists. They say that women are not shying away from the higher rungs of the career ladder. Rather, they are being pushed off by unfair forces in the job market, or running into structural barriers as they climb.
“Novel” was the most common self-applied positive term, and those papers with a male first or last author used the word 59.2% more than women-women papers did. But “promising” was even more skewed: papers with a male first or last author used this word 72.3% more than those with women first and last authors. The researchers further found that such self-promotion was associated with a greater number of subsequent citations. And both effects were bigger in prestigious journals.
One possibility to be tested is that men really do do more “novel” and “promising” research than women, and thus merit their self-praise. The paper’s authors try to do so by looking at the prestige-rankings of the journals involved, and by comparing similar papers in particular research areas as carefully as possible. Although it is hard to exclude the possibility entirely, other research suggests that men are simply more into self-puffery than women are.
So should women blow their own trumpets harder? One recent paper rebuts that easy conclusion. In a study of economics research, women were subject to more comments from reviewers, and made to revise their submissions more. Women’s “readability scores” increased over subsequent drafts, and over subsequent papers across their careers, while men’s did not. In trying to please stubborn reviewers, women seem to be making their abstracts simpler and more straightforward.
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