Publishing While Female: are Women Held to Higher Standards? Evidence from Peer Review

Supplementary data are available online at: https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/132/648/2951/6586337#supplementary-data .Notes: The data and codes for this paper are available on the Journal repository. They were checked for their ability to reproduce the results presented in the paper. The replication package for this paper is available at the following address: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6491871.JEL A11 - Role of Economics; Role of Economists; Market for EconomistsD8 - Information, Knowledge, and UncertaintyJ16 - Economics of Gender; Non-labor DiscriminationJ7 - Labor DiscriminationCopyright © The Author(s) 2022. Female authors are under-represented in top economics journals. In this paper, I investigate whether higher writing standards contribute to the problem. I find that (i) female-authored papers are 1%–6% 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) female-authored papers take longer under review. Using a subjective expected utility framework, I argue that higher writing standards for women are consistent with these stylised facts. A counterfactual analysis suggests that senior female economists may, as a result, write at least 5% more clearly than they otherwise would. As a final exercise, I show tentative evidence that women adapt to biased treatment in ways that may disguise it as voluntary choice