key: cord-0669972-y7nmf71f
authors: Cui, Ruomeng; Ding, Hao; School, Feng Zhu Goizueta Business; University, Emory; School, Harvard Business; University, Harvard
title: Gender Inequality in Research Productivity During the COVID-19 Pandemic
date: 2020-06-17
journal: nan
DOI: nan
sha: d4a4914c18ecfe20b4096529458df1985a7cbee7
doc_id: 669972
cord_uid: y7nmf71f

We study the disproportionate impact of the lockdown as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak on female and male academics' research productivity in social science. We collect data from the largest open-access preprint repository for social science on 41,858 research preprints in 18 disciplines produced by 76,832 authors across 25 countries in a span of two years. We find that during the 10 weeks after the lockdown in the United States, although the total research productivity increased by 35%, female academics' productivity dropped by 13.9% relative to that of male academics. We also show that several disciplines drive such gender inequality. Finally, we find that this intensified productivity gap is more pronounced for academics in top-ranked universities, and the effect exists in six other countries.

The Coronavirus 2019 pandemic has significantly changed the way people live and work. We study how this pandemic shock affected academics' research productivity using data from the largest open-access repositories for social science in the world-Social Science Research Network (SSRN). 1 We provide evidence that female researchers' productivity significantly dropped relative to that of male researchers as a result of the lockdown in the United States.

In response to the pandemic, the US and many other countries have mandated their citizens to stay at home. As a result, many people had to carry out both work and household duties at home. Most countries have closed their schools and daycare centers, which has massively increased childcare needs. Given that the childcare provided by grandparents and friends is limited due to the social distancing protocol, most families have to take care of the children themselves. In addition, restaurants have been either closed or do not allowed dine-ins, which has increased the need for food preparation at home. Given that women, on average, are burdened with disproportionately more child care, domestic labor, and household responsibilities (Bianchi et al. 2012) , they are likely to be more affected than men during the lockdown.

The lockdown has also disrupted how academics carry out their activities. Many countries have closed their universities, so faculties have to conduct research and teaching at home. Conducting scientific research often requires a quiet and interruption-free environment because concentration is critical for creative thinking. The unequal distribution of domestic duties 2 means that female faculties are likely to be disproportionately affected compared with their male colleagues.

Anecdotal evidence provides mixed support (Dolan and Lawless 2020) . A recent survey on 4,500 principal investigators reported significant and heterogeneous declines in their time spent on research (Myers et al. 2020) . Several journal editors have noticed that while there is a 20-30% increase in submissions as a result of the pandemic, most of this increase can be attributed to male academics (Beck 2020) . Amano-Patio et al. (2020) find that a particularly large number of senior male economists, instead of mid-career economists, have been exploring research questions arising from the COVID-19 shock. Others have seen no change or are receiving comparatively more submissions from women since the lockdown (Kitchener 2020) . However, there is dearth of systematic evidence on whether and to what extent the shock affects gender inequality in the academia.

In this paper, we use a large dataset on female and male academics' production of new research papers to systematically study whether COVID-19 has a disproportionate effect on female academics' productivity. We also identify the disciplines, universities, and countries in which this inequality is intensified. We collect the data on all research papers uploaded to SSRN in 18 disciplines from December 2018 to May 2019 and from December 2019 to May 2020. We extract information on paper titles, author names, author affiliations, and author addresses. We use such information to identify the authors' countries and institutions. We also use their names and their faculty pages to identify their gender. The final dataset includes 41,858 papers written by 76,832 authors from 25 countries. Our main analysis focuses on academics in the US, and we then perform the same analysis for other countries.

We take a difference-in-differences (DID) approach to estimate the effect. We compute the number of papers produced by female and male academics in each week. We then compare the variations 2 Women spend almost twice as much time on housework and childcare in the US (Bianchi et al. 2012 ). There are 8.5 million more single mothers than single fathers in the US (Alon et al. 2020) . Even in the gender-egalitarian countries of northern Europe, women do almost two-thirds of the unpaid work (The European Commission 2016). Among heterosexual couples with female breadwinners, women still do most of the care work (Chesley and Flood 2017) . The same pattern exists in the academia (Schiebinger and Gilmartin 2010, Andersen et al. 2020) . Women professors spend more time doing housework and carework than men professors across various ranks, for example, 34.1 hours versus 27.6 hours per week for lecturers, 29.6 hours versus 25.1 hours per week for assistant professors, and 37.7 hours versus 24.5 hours per week for associate professors in women and men's research productivity gap before and after the start of the lockdown, and show that the gap increased after the start of the lockdown. We also show that female and male authors' preprint volume followed the parallel time trend before the lockdown, and we find no significant changes in the research productivity gap in 2019 during the same time of the year. Taken together, these results suggest that the intensified disparity is primarily driven by the pandemic shock.

We find that during the 10 weeks since the lockdown began, female academics' research productivity dropped by 13.9% compared to that of male academics in the US. The effect persists as we varied the time window since the pandemic outbreak in the analysis. Our findings lend empirical credence to the argument that when female and male academics face a short-term reorganization of care and work time, women become significantly less productive. We also find that the effect is more pronounced in top-ranked research universities. We further show that this effect exists in six other countries.

While gender inequality has been long documented for academics in terms of tenure evaluation (Antecol et al. 2018) , coauthoring choices (Sarsons 2017) , and citations received (Ghiasi et al. 2015) , the COVID-19 pandemic brings this issue to the forefront. Our study is among the first to rigorously quantify such inequality in research productivity as a result of the pandemic, and our results highlight that this disruption exacerbated gender inequality in the academic world.

There are concerns that because all academics will participate together in open competitions for promotions and positions, these short-term changes in productivity will affect long-term career outcomes (Minello 2020 ). Thus, institutions should take this inequality into consideration when evaluating faculty members.

Our paper is closely related to the stream of literature on productivity, a central topic in operations management. The past studies have examined key determinants for workers' productivity such as peer effects (Huckman et al. 2009, Song et al. 2018, Tan and  (Pierce et al. 2020) . In particular, multitasking has been shown to reduce productivity for workers who perform complex tasks because of their limited cognitive capacities (KC 2014 , Bray et al. 2016 . In our context, when working from home, academics are facing an increasing need to allocate their cognitive capacity across house and work tasks, making those who get more distractions from housework struggle from multitasking. The unequal distribution of home responsibilities means that women are more likely to deal with multitasking at home during the lockdown. Our results show the consequence of working from home in that female academics are more negatively affected in research productivity, highlighting gender inequality as an important factor to consider when measuring productivity.

We collect data from SSRN, a repository of preprints with the objective to rapidly disseminate scholarly research in social science. We gather data on all social science preprints submitted from December 2018 to May 2019 and from December 2019 to May 2020. We extract information on paper titles, author names, author affiliations, and author addresses. We use the authors' addresses to identify their countries. The COVID-19 outbreak began at different time points across countries, so we collect each country's start date of lockdown from news sources and the United Nations' report. 3 We drop authors without addresses or with addresses in more than one country because we cannot determine when these authors were affected by the lockdown. We also drop countries without a sufficient number of authors in our data set. The final data consist of a total of 41,858 papers in 18 disciplines produced by 76,832 authors from 25 countries.

To identify the authors' genders, we first use a database called Genderize, 4 which predicts the genders based on their first names with a confidence level. About 78% of the authors' genders were identified with over 80% confidence levels. For the remaining authors, we use Amazon Mechanical Turk to manually search for their professional webpages based on names and affiliations and then infer their genders from their profile photos. Our dataset contains a total of 21,733 female academics and 55,099 male academics.

We aggregate the number of new preprints at the weekly level. We then count the number of papers uploaded by each author in each week. To measure the effective productivity for preprints with multiple authors, when a preprint has n authors, each author gets a publication count of 1/n. 5 Finally, we aggregate the effective number of papers to the gender level: in each week, we count the total number of papers produced by male and female authors separately in each social science discipline. Figure 1 plots the time trend of preprints in aggregation from December 3, 2019 to May 19, 2020 in the US. The vertical line represents the week of March 11, 2020, which is the start of the implementation of the nationwide lockdown measures in the US. 6 We can observe that male academics, on average, have submitted more preprints than female academics, and that female and male academics' research productivity evolved in parallel before the lockdown. After the lockdown started, however, male academics significantly boosted their productivity, whereas female academics' productivity did not change much, indicating an increased productivity gap.

3 https://en.unesco.org/covid19/educationresponse, accessed June 2020 4 https://genderize.io/, accessed June 2020 5 Note that in many social science disciplines, author names are listed in alphabetical order. We use the authors' affiliations to identify their universities. To ascertain whether the productivity gap becomes intensified or weakened across top-ranked and lower-ranked research universities, we collect social science research rankings from three sources: QS University Ranking, 7 Times Higher Education, 8 and Academic Ranking of World University. 9 We then use these data to rank US universities. In total, there are 9,934 preprints produced by US authors, 2,493 of which are produced by 3,877 female researchers and 7,441 are produced by 11,617 male researchers. We gather the country-specific lockdown time to split our sample to before and after the lockdown for each country.

In this section, we identify the effect of the COVID-19 outbreak on research productivity. We first elaborate our identification methodology that leverages the exogenous pandemic shock by using a DID regression. We then report the estimation results of gender inequality in the US, across universities, and across countries.

Our identification exploits the lockdown as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak as an exogenous shock that has caused substantial disruptions on academic activities, requiring academics to conduct research, teach, and carry out household duties at home. The validity of our approach resides in the assumption that the shock is exogenous with respect to the researchers' anticipated responses.

If a particular gender group of researchers anticipated and strategically prepared for the shock by accelerating the wrap-up of their current research papers, among others, this could confound the treatment effect. In reality, this possibility is unlikely because of the rapid development of the situation. 11 We adopt the DID methodology, a common approach used to evaluate people's or organizations' responses to natural shocks (Seamans and Zhu 2013 , Calvo et al. 2019 ). We perform the DID analysis using outcome variables in two levels: the total number of preprints aggregated across all disciplines and the number of preprints in each discipline.

We first compare the productivity gap between female and male researchers prior to and after the pandemic outbreak using the following model specification with the aggregate-level data:

where g denotes the gender, t denotes the week, log(P reprints gt ) represents the logged number of preprints uploaded for gender g during week t, γ t is the time fixed effect, and t is the error term.

The time fixed-effect γ t includes a set of weekly time dummies that control for time trends. The dummy variable F emale g equals 1 if gender g is a female academics, and 0 otherwise. The dummy

variable Lockdown t equals 1 if week t occurs after the lockdown measure was adopted (i.e., the week of March 11, 2020), and 0 otherwise. Its main effect is absorbed by the time fixed effects. The coefficient β estimates the effect of lockdown on female academics' research productivity relative to male academics productivity.

We also use the discipline-level panel data to estimate the effect with the following DID specification:

where i denotes each discipline, δ i is the discipline fixed effect that captures the time-invariant characteristics of discipline i, log(P reprints igt ) represents the logged number of preprints uploaded 11 COVID-19 was regarded as low risk and not a threat to the US in late January (Moreno 2020) and no significant actions had been taken other than travel warnings issued for four countries until late February (Franck 2020) . It quickly turned into a global pandemic after the declaration of the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020 followed by the nationwide shelter-in-place orders within a week. Source: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/icd/An nouncement-New-ICD-code-for-coronavirus-3-18-2020.pdf, accessed June 2020.

to discipline i for gender g during week t, and igt is the error term. As before, we include the time fixed effect γ t . Table 2 reports the estimated effect of the pandemic shock on research productivity at the aggregate level using Equation (1). Table 3 reports the estimated effect at the discipline level using

Equation (2). In each analysis, we use 14 weeks before the lockdown as the pre-treatment period and 6 weeks, 7 weeks, ... and 10 weeks after the lockdown as the post-treatment periods. The analyses yield consistent results. First, consistent with our summary statistics, the results show that fewer preprints are produced by female academics than male academics in general. Second, since the lockdown began, there has been a significant reduction in female academics' productivity relative to their male colleagues', indicating an exacerbated productivity gap in gender. The coefficient of the interacted term in Column (1) of Table 2 suggests a reduction of 17.9% in females' productivity over the six-week period after the lockdown relative to the males', and the coefficient of the interacted term in Column (5) suggests an average reduction of 13.9%. 12 Table 2 Impact of Lockdown on Gender Inequality (1). The coefficients for 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 weeks since the lockdown are presented in columns (1)-(5), respectively. Significance at * p < 0.1; * * p < 0.05; * * * p < 0.01.

We then repeat the analysis as in Table 2 for each discipline separately. Table 4 reports the coefficients of the interacted term, F emale g × Lockdown t , for each discipline. We find that the gender differences significantly intensified in several disciplines, namely, Criminal, Economics, Finance, Health Economics, Political Science, and Sustainability. Table 5 replicates the DID analysis using Equation (2) for a subset of academics based on the rankings of their affiliated universities. 13 Due to our focus on social science, we use the 2020 QS World University Ranking for social sciences and management as the main analysis. We separately 12 Because the outcome variable is logged, the percentage change in the outcome variable is computed as e coefficient − 1.

13 It is possible that some authors are affiliated with more than one academic institutions. We use the highest ranked institution as their affiliation in such cases. (2). The coefficients for 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 weeks since the lockdown are presented in columns (1)-(5), respectively. Significance at * p < 0.1; * * p < 0.05; * * * p < 0.01. (1) for each discipline. The coefficients for 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 weeks since the lockdown are presented in columns (1)-(5), respectively. Time fixed effects at the weekly level are included in all regressions. Standard errors and estimates of other variables are omitted for brevity. Significance at * p < 0.1; * * p < 0.05; * * * p < 0.01.

analyze academics in universities ranked in the top 10, 20,..., and 100. The results show that the COVID-19 effect is more pronounced in top-tier universities and that this effect in general decreases and becomes less significant as we include more lower-ranked universities. We find similar results when using the two other rankings, as shown in Appendix Table A .1.

Finally, we examine how the estimated gender inequality varies across countries by replicating the analysis for academics in each country. Figure 2 illustrates the impact on the productivity gap graphically by plotting the estimates of the interacted term with 90% and 95% confidence intervals, of which a negative value represents a drop in female academics' research productivity relative to male academics'. We can observe that most countries-21 out of 25 countries-experienced This table reports the estimated coefficients based on Equation (1) for universities within each rank group. The coefficients for 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 weeks since the lockdown are presented in columns (1)-(5), respectively. Time fixed effects at the weekly level are included in each regression. Standard errors and estimates of other variables are omitted for brevity. Significance at * p < 0.1; * * p < 0.05; * * * p < 0.01. a decline in female researchers' productivity. In addition to the US, six countries have shown statistically significant declines, namely, Japan, China, Australia, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Note that because SSRN is a repository primarily used by US researchers, SSRN's preprints for other countries might be limited in number, which might weaken our ability to detect changes.

In short, we find that the lockdown has adversely affected female researchers' productivity relative to that of male researchers. We also find a large heterogeneity of such gender inequality across disciplines, universities, and countries.

In this section, we report several robustness tests. Specifically, we check the parallel trends assumption and conduct falsification tests to ensure that our estimated effects are not idiosyncratic.

Parallel trends. The key identification assumption for the DID estimation is the parallel trends assumption: before the COVID-19 shock, female and male researchers' productivity would follow the same time trend. In Appendix Figure 

This graph plots the estimates of the interacted term with 90% and 95% confidence intervals in each country. The negative values represent female academics' research productivity drop relative to male academics' across countries.

The benchmark group is the week of the pandemic outbreak. The coefficients β −14 to β −1 identify any week-by-week pre-treatment difference between the female and the male researchers, which we expect to be insignificant. We then repeat the same analysis with our discipline-level data.

Appendix 

Our paper adds to the long-standing literature on gender equality, an important topic in social science. For example, the literature has shown evidence of fairness in parental leaves , inequality in tenure evaluation (Sarsons 2017 , Antecol et al. 2018 , recognition received (Ghiasi et al. 2015) , compensation (Pierce et al. 2020) , and job hiring (Fernandez-Mateo and Fernandez 2016) . Researchers have therefore investigated business innovations to help empower women (Plambeck and Ramdas 2020) . The COVID-19 crisis brings a long existing issue to the forefront-the limitations faced by women who often contribute more in childcare and housework.

We contribute to the literature by providing direct tests on the impact of the pandemic shock on gender inequality in the academia.

We show that since the lockdown began, women have produced 13.9%-17.9% less research papers compared to men in the US. We also find that the effect exists in several disciplines and among top-ranked universities. Finally, we find that the increase in productivity inequality is significant in seven countries.

Our findings suggest that if the lockdown is kept in place for too long, female academics in certain disciplines at top-ranked universities are likely to be significantly disadvantaged. Thus, universities thus need to take this potential gender inequality into account as they implement policies such as tenure clock extensions to the faculty in response to the pandemic.

Our study has a few limitations. First, our study focuses on social science disciplines and, thus, the findings may not be generalizable to other disciplines. Second, we have limited information about the researchers in our dataset. Future research could collect additional information such as their parental status to directly test the mechanism underlying the observed empirical patterns. 

This table reports the estimated coefficients in Equation (1) across universities with different rankings. The coefficients for 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 weeks since the lockdown are presented in columns (1)-(5), respectively. Time fixed effects at the weekly level are included in all regressions. Note that we omit reporting standard errors and estimates of other variables for brevity. Significance at * p < 0.1; * * p < 0.05; * * * p < 0.01. (3). The coefficients for 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 weeks since the lockdown are presented in columns (1)-(5), respectively. Note that we omit reporting estimates of other variables for brevity. Time fixed effects at the weekly level are included in all regressions. Significance at * p < 0.1; * * p < 0.05; * * * p < 0.01. The table summarizes the weekly number of papers from December 2018 to May 2019. In total, there are 9,333 preprints produced by 14,767 US authors, 2,413 of which are produced by 3,876 female researchers and 6,920 are produced by 10,891 male researchers. We gather the country-specific lockdown time to split our sample to before and after the lockdown for each country. This table reports the estimated coefficients of the interacted term, Female × Lockdown, in Equation (1). The coefficients for 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 weeks since the lockdown are presented in columns (1)-(5), respectively. Note that we omit reporting estimates of other variables for brevity. Time fixed effects at the weekly level are included in all regressions. Significance at * p < 0.1; * * p < 0.05; * * * p < 0.01.

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