Women increasingly occupy jobs in psychological research, but continue to face career barriers. One such barrier is fewer authorship and publication opportunities, with women often having fewer first authorships than men. In this research, we examine the overlooked role of middle authorship. Middle authorship contributes to various indices of productivity, while having lower costs. Study 1 looks at five years of authorship in two major journals in social and personality psychology. Study 2 examines publication records of all social psychology faculty in the Netherlands. Both studies find that women have fewer authorship possibilities: In Study 1, women were underrepresented as authors in academic journals, while women in Study 2 had shorter publication lists. More importantly, this tendency was exacerbated for middle authorship positions. Furthermore, the percentage of middle authorship publications were positively related to more publications overall. A focus on middle authorship highlights previously underestimated challenges women continue to face in psychological research.
22% of collaborative publications had all-male authors and 13% had all-female authors. Focus on first-authorship may underestimate gender disparities in publication rates. Gender disparities in middle authorship may harm women’s careers via lower productivity metrics.
Women make up an increasing proportion of researchers in social and personality psychology. The percentage of women in the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) has grown from approximately 33% in 1986 (
To study disparities in publication rates, a large body of previous research has mainly focused on first authorship, while concentrating less on last, and neglecting middle authorship positions. For instance, women were less likely than men to be first authors across academic fields (
However, it is also important to examine gender disparities in authorship beyond the first author position. Research productivity and impact metrics (e.g., h-index, citation counts) do not weigh publications by contribution or authorship position (
Additionally, it is important to understand gender differences in light of collaboration dynamics between men and women. For example, men tend to publish more overall and collaborate more with other men (
As middle and last authorship can be ambiguous, the underrepresentation of women may be magnified. This may be especially true when looking at mixed-gender collaborations, as women are often under-credited for their work and are excluded from male collaborative networks. Women are perceived as contributing less when they collaborate with men, and are less likely to receive full credit for contributions—even if they actually spend
Women also may not be sought for collaboration to begin with, which is likely to have a larger effect on middle and last than on first authorship. Men across science fields tend to have more collaborators than women and these collaborators are more often male (
In the current work, we examined gender differences across authorship positions. In Study 1, we assessed authorship in two major social and personality psychology journals. First, based on previous work (e.g.,
Study 1 was a bibliometric analysis of authorship by gender in two major social and personality psychology journals over five years. We examined gender representation across all collaborative publications and in mixed-gender collaborations. We compared the percentage of women in each authorship position relative to the percentage of women in the field. Then, we examined the percentage of women in first-author positions relative to all other authorship positions. As an exploratory analysis, we also compared the percentage of women to the percentage of men.
We coded five years of articles (2012–2016) in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP;
Two research assistants blind to the study hypotheses coded gender for each author. Gender was determined by examining the gender stereotypicality of the author’s first name and internet searches for author information (pictures or profiles using gendered pronouns) on personal, research, or university webpages (
While we did not have differing hypotheses for each middle authorship position, we chose to not collapse over middle authorship positions for two reasons: First, examining each position separately allows for a more comparable approach to the binary coding of first and last authorship position, while collapsing would have led to percentages of female and male middle authors on each paper. Second, the percentage due to collapsing would have also been influenced by the number of authors on each paper, unevenly weighting the value of each author, which we avoid by examining each position.
Across publications
First, to test our first hypothesis and in line with previous research, we examined the percentage of female authors in each position
To approximate the percentage of women in the field, we used the percentage of women provided by SPSP for their membership data. We chose SPSP data for several reasons: First, we followed
First, we examined the percentage of women per publication, that is, interval scale data that could vary from 0% women to 100% women, using a
Position | Percentage | χ2(1) | φ | 95% CIφ | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1st | 1151 | 48.0 | 4.26 | .039 | .06 | .003, .12 |
2nd | 786 | 38.4 | 49.76 | < .001 | .25 | .18, .32 |
3rd | 470 | 40.2 | 21.89 | < .001 | .22 | .13, .30 |
4th | 221 | 43.0 | 5.68 | .017 | .16 | .03, .29 |
5th | 109 | 41.3 | 4.12 | .042 | .19 | .01, .37 |
Last | 1151 | 37.1 | 89.01 | < .001 | .28 | .22, .33 |
Next, we looked at mixed-gender collaborations, to determine whether women’s underrepresentation extends to publications on which men and women collaborated (as underrepresentation could be driven by more male solo-gender collaborative publications). Within mixed-gender collaborations, women comprised 45.8% of collaborators on average per publication (
Here, we tested whether women would be even more underrepresented in non-first authorship positions than in first authorship positions, in line with our second hypothesis. We examined this hypothesis in mixed-gender publications, and in all collaborative publications. While our hypothesis concerned mixed-gender publications, we also examined all publications to see whether this effect extended to collaborative publications in general. To do so, we compared percentages of women in each position to the percentage of women in the first authorship position. Again, we treated each position as unique.
A series of chi-square tests indicated that within mixed-gender publications, women were more likely to be in a position of first authorship (54.2%) relative to second, third, fourth, fifth, and last authorship, 37.5%–45.6%, χ2(1) = 5.53–83.87,
Within all collaborative publications, somewhat similar findings emerged, showing that the effects of mixed-gender collaborations are strong enough to influence numbers in collaborations overall. Women were more likely to be in a position of first authorship (48%) than second, third, or last authorship, 37.1%–40.2%, χ2(1) = 11.42–54.44,
We also tested whether men or women made up a higher percentage of authors for first to fifth and last authorship positions. Again, we treated each position as unique and, in line with our previous analyses, only included collaborative publications (i.e., publications with more than one author) for first authorship (in contrast to
In all collaborations, there were statistically equal amounts of men and women in the first authorship position, χ2(1) = 1.92,
We repeated these analyses for mixed-gender collaborations. In mixed-gender collaborations, there were significantly
Finally, to compare our results to previous findings (
Study 1 provides first evidence that looking only at first authorship underestimates gender disparities in authorship. Overall, we replicate previous findings that compared to the percentage of women in the field, women were underrepresented in all authorship positions in two top social and personality psychology journals. Similar results are found when comparing the number of men and women to an equal distribution, though there were not fewer women than men in the first authorship position. However, we also find that women were particularly underrepresented in non-first authorship positions. Differences in women’s representation between first and non-first authorship were even more pronounced when looking only at mixed-gender collaborations, when women and men worked together on a paper. When women collaborate with men, they might be more likely to lead the research than be credited with non-primary contributions. Finally, we do not completely replicate the findings of
Authorship differences in individual journals could stem from a range of factors, including gendered distributions into subfields and fluctuations over time. Even though we account for this by coding two journals, and coding a range of years, we supplement our analyses in Study 2 with a sample of all social psychology faculty in the Netherlands. We chose the Netherlands because the scientific system in the Netherlands is similar to the U.S. and other Western countries, and universities in the Netherlands rank well in international rankings of psychological research (
We examined publications (
A sensitivity power analysis indicated this sample would provide 80% power (alpha = .05) to detect a small to medium-sized effect of η2 = .04 for a MANOVA with an expected large positive correlation (
We obtained publication records from university and personal websites and research databases (GoogleScholar, PsychInfo, and ResearchGate). We coded only English-language empirical journal articles that were published or in press (where listed). We coded the target author’s authorship position (first, middle, or last) for each publication, target gender, target academic position (25.5% Full Professors, 20.9% Associate Professors, 49.0% Assistant Professors, 4.6% Professor Emeriti), and target year of PhD if available (1966–2017;
Overall, women had significantly fewer publications than men,
Authorship | Women |
Men |
||
---|---|---|---|---|
First author | 50.93*** | 21.61 | 39.17** | 21.37 |
Middle author | 32.33† | 15.18 | 37.35† | 17.72 |
Last author | 16.73** | 15.12 | 23.51** | 15.87 |
Total publicationsa | 32.44** | 42.38 | 63.23** | 68.70 |
aThis row reports the total number of publications, not percentages.
Gender differences in publication records may occur because of historic trends in gender representation—men are likely to have been in the field longer and to be in supervisory positions. To assess the extent to which gender differences in authorship and number of publications occurred beyond cohort effects, we included years since PhD as a control variable in an ANCOVA for publications overall and the MANCOVA for percentages of publication positions
Finally, we examined whether gender, authorship percentages, and their interaction predicted an author’s total number of articles, controlling for years since obtaining a PhD. We used three regressions, one for first, middle, and last authorship each, and regressed the total number of articles on gender, authorship percentages, their interaction, and years since obtaining a PhD without centering. A higher percentage of first-author publications predicted fewer total publications, β = -0.31,
We provide first evidence that women are underrepresented in publication authorship beyond first authorship positions and show gender disparities in middle- and last-authorship positions in social and personality psychology. We also replicate the finding that women have fewer publications overall (e.g.,
Gender differences in authorship percentages were not explained by gender differences in career longevity — men had a lower percentage of first- and a higher percentage of middle-author publications than women, even when controlling for the year a PhD was earned. Crucially, middle and last authorship positively predicted more publications overall, while first authorship predicted fewer publications, regardless of gender. This suggests that middle and last authorship can be beneficial in increasing the total number of publications, and potentially related indices of productivity.
First authorship is usually awarded to the person leading a project and contributing the most work, while middle authorship is awarded for other, smaller contributions (
Gender differences in middle authorship might be based both on warmth and on competence stereotypes. With regard to warmth stereotypes, gender stereotypes and social roles paint women as inherently warm and helpful, in contrast to men who are expected to be more independent and self-promoting (
Next, women might be middle authors less frequently due to competence stereotypes. Women might not only receive less credit for their contributions, but they might also be invited to collaborate on research projects less, especially by men (
Gender differences in middle authorship might also stem from gender differences in behavior. Men are stereotypically more assertive and agentic (
Women might also have less time to engage in research, so they might not have the time to invest in the projects of others in addition to their own. There might be several reasons for this. For example, women, especially those with children, tend to spend more time on housework and childcare due to unequal distributions of labor (
Finally, gender differences in middle authorship might be explained by strategic considerations. On a positive note, one such consideration might stem from scientists trying to actively counter the lower number of first-authored publications by women (
Another strategic consideration might concern the number of first-authored publications a person needs to advance in their career. In general, women might need more first-authored publications than men to advance in their career, for example, to get a postdoctoral fellowship (
An additional strategic consideration might be based on the idea that men are more likely to get published. There is some support for this idea both for social and personality journals and more broadly in other fields (
Finally, women may strategically cooperate less. This idea seems counterintuitive at first, due to stereotypical assumptions that women are more communal and should cooperate more (
In line with this, cooperating on a research project can be seen as a prisoner’s dilemma. If everyone cooperates, the diverse expertise of people might lead to more positive outcomes (i.e., higher quality or more efficient research, e.g.,
The two studies we presented were limited to the field of social and personality psychology. Social and personality psychology presents an interesting field to test gender representation as women have been historically underrepresented, but are a slight majority now. Psychologists also have a personal interest in understanding the collaboration and gender dynamics of their own field. However, additional research is needed to examine whether results generalize to other subdisciplines of psychology and to other scientific disciplines. Future research may provide insight into how the gender makeup of a discipline or subdiscipline affects the stereotypes, behaviors, and strategies that may influence authorship and collaboration.
Additionally, these studies are based in real-world journal and publication data. As such, they have high external validity and strong implications for collaboration dynamics within social and personality psychology. However, the data are largely descriptive. Here, we identify patterns in authorship and rule out some potential confounds, such as length of career. Though we speculated on potential causes for women’s underrepresentation (i.e., stereotypes, behaviors, and strategies), it is outside the scope of our data to address causality. However, it is essential to understand the causes of these effects to best counteract them. Future research could further examine the drivers of women’s underrepresentation as middle and last authors and overrepresentation as first authors in mixed-gender collaborations. Then, interventions could target such mechanisms.
For example, experimental or quasi-experimental research could assess the distribution of tasks or credit given to hypothetical researchers based on gender and gender stereotypes, or invite researchers into the lab to work on a collaborative project. If gender and gender stereotypes drive collaboration patterns, then (potential) collaborators need to credit women’s research “help” as substantial contributions and recognize women’s research competencies more. This could potentially be facilitated through improved documentation of contributions to research projects. If gender differences in assertiveness are an important cause for disparities, women might need to further develop negotiation skills and men may need to assess if they are being overly assertive in claiming credit for their contributions or offering unsolicited contributions at the expense of others. Furthermore, clearer guidelines for authorship could help remove ambiguity in assessing whether authorship is negotiable at all. Survey research on publication records, collaboration strategies, and time spent on research (vs. other obligations like childcare responsibilities) could provide insight into strategic or external constraints to gender inequality in authorship and collaboration. If time is the driving factor, changes would need to be implemented on the organizational level (e.g., distribution of teaching and service) and the national level (possibilities for child care, distribution of child care).
We provide initial evidence that women are underrepresented in all authorship positions, but are counterintuitively more often in first-authorship positions than others in mixed-gender collaborations. Studies that only focus on gender differences in first-authorship may therefore obscure the extent of gender differences in publishing. While first-authorship is surely important, women may still face a disadvantage with shorter publication records and lower productivity indices due to fewer middle authorships. First-authorship is a necessary, but likely insufficient, means to research career advancement.
For this article, two datasets are freely available (
The Supplementary Materials contain the datasets and codebooks as well as additional materials for both studies (for access see
We would like to thank Malte Wollermann for assistance with data scraping and data preparation. We would like to thank Andrea Przegendza, Daniel Schulz, Niclas O’Donnokoé, and Maria Buergstein for assistance with coding.
Corrections, retractions, and editorial comments were excluded from analysis.
We were unable to code the gender of 10 authors in PSPB and 27 authors in JPSP.
For which author gender could be identified.
The percentage of female authors in each position was calculated as the number of female authors in this authorship position divided by the number of all authors in this authorship position.
In our analyses, we omitted graduate students because the number of publications among graduate students is relatively low (
Middle authorship was weighted equally for each paper and did not depend on the number of authors as in Study 1.
While this analysis allows us to control for cohort effects and rule out that men only have fewer first and more middle authorships due to being more senior, other explanations still remain possible. For example, in psychology, there exists a trend of having more authors on a paper over time (e.g.,
Additionally, the same behavior by men and women might yield different outcomes for men and women. For example, an analysis of authors frequently publishing in JPSP showed that for men, negotiating with the editor resulted in more JPSP publications. The same was not true for women (
We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for the idea in this and the next paragraph.
The authors have no funding to report.
The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Laura Van Berkel is now an AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow.