Publishing while female: Are women held to higher standards? Evidence from peer review.

Conditional on the quality of a paper, are women held to higher writing standards in academic peer review? Using readability scores to investigate, I find: (i) female-authored papers are 1–6 percent better written than equivalent papers by men; (ii) the gap widens during peer review; (iii) women improve their writing as they publish more papers (but men do not); (iv) men do not appear to compensate by raising quality along another dimension. Using a subjective expected utility framework, I show that tougher editorial standards are most obviously consistent with authors’ observed choices. A conservative estimate derived from the model suggests higher writing standards may cause senior female economists to write at least 5–7 percent more clearly than they otherwise would