A new study led by the University of Michigan has found a gender gap in online scholarly self-promotion, with women scientists significantly less likely to feature their research papers on social media. This could lead to gender disparities in visibility metrics, such as citations and media mentions, that influence hiring and promotion decisions.
In an analysis of 23 million posts on Twitter (now X) regarding some 2.8 million research papers authored by over 3.5 million scientists between 2013 and 2018, the authors determined women are, on average, 28 percent less likely then their male colleagues to self-promote their research. This finding held true even when controlling for year of publication, institutional affiliation, social media use, and field of study – including the STEM disciplines that are relatively gender-balanced. Notably, the authors found the gender gap in self-promotion increases with higher performance and academic status, being most pronounced for research-prolific women from top-ranked institutions who contribute to high-impact journals.
Overall, self-promotion on Twitter was found to increase tweets of papers, but the increase was slightly smaller for women than for men. The authors theorize this could be a result of different language styles used by men and women. For example, men were found to use more promotional words such as novel, excellent, robust, remarkable, and unprecedented, while women used more supportive words such as amazing, supportive, and inspiring.
“These results suggest that women’s concerns about pushback in response to their self-promotion may dominate the likely high self-assessment associated with being an established scholar and assurance that the contribution is worth promoting,” the authors write. “When accomplished women self-promote less than comparable men in the scientific workforce characterized by a leaky pipeline with fewer and fewer women in higher ranks, women’s visibility will remain low.”