TWO TO TANGO? GENDER DIFFERENCES IN THE DECISIONS TO PUBLISH AND COAUTHOR

I. INTRODUCTION There is a well-developed mythology regarding the presence of "old boy networks" and their importance in explaining gender differences in labor market outcomes, as articulated by Saloner (1985). Nonetheless, aside from works such as Simon and Warner (1992), there is relatively little empirical evidence examining the impact of networks on market outcomes, how these effects differ by gender, and whether gender differences in network access change over time as women become more well represented in a profession. The paucity of empirical evidence arises in part from the difficulty of measuring the presence of such networks. Prior work, including that of Saint-Paul (2001) and Erickson and Jacoby (2003), has found evidence that networks facilitate the adoption of team-oriented work practices and information sharing that increase average worker productivity in management and professional jobs. On the other hand, studies such as that by Marmaros and Sacerdote (2002) have also found that women have less access to networks than their male counterparts in both private and public sector jobs, which has been shown to yield gender differences in job placement and other labor market outcomes. This article considers how gender differences in networks are manifested in a specific male-dominated profession (i.e., academic economists) and in a specific work-related outcome (i.e., the decision to coauthor articles) in which access to networks is likely to be important. The analysis uses uniquely detailed individual and job-level data for PhD economists included in nearly four decades of American Economic Association (AEA) membership to examine the role of networks on the joint decision to publish and coauthor. The unique matching process of PhD economists between academic and nonacademic jobs and within the hierarchy of academic departments along with the relative ease of observing joint research provide a rare opportunity to distinguish differential network access and measure joint production. The results demonstrate the importance of networks in the production of research output and that new (female) entrants into a male-dominated profession do not have equal access to these professional networks. The results also provide evidence that women are able to plug into networks over time as the profession becomes more gender representative. Our study contributes to the literature on the role of networks in the labor market in several ways. First, the profession of academic economist is well suited to this study, because it is made up of workers who produce a relatively homogenous output (i.e., scholarly journal articles) and that share a common set of job-related tasks (i.e., teaching, research, and service). Second, the incidence of coauthorship is an observable outcome measure of network utilization (a phenomenon inherently difficult to measure) in the tradition of the business productivity literature, as found in Sabel (1993). Third, there is extensive evidence in the literature that journal publications are positively linked to academic salaries, as found in Siegfried and White (1973) and Sauer (1988); that the propensity to coauthor is positively associated with publication output, as in as found in Durden and Perri (1995) and Maske et al. (2003); that there are gender differences in tendencies to coauthor, as shown by Ferber and Teiman (1980) and McDowell and Smith (1992); and that there are gender differences in professional outcomes, such as publications, salary, and promotion, as seen in McDowell (1982), Hansen et al. (1978), Formby et al. (1993), and Broder (1993). Cumulatively, these studies suggest that understanding the determinants of coauthorship is important for evaluating the sources and the extent of gender inequity in the profession. Prior work on coauthorship behavior has analyzed patterns over time and across disciplines. Several studies, including Hudson (1996), McDowell and Melvin (1983), and Barnett et al. …