Ryder Spearmann
Aug 22, 2017 · 1 min read

That’s funny… I thought women and men were the same.

If women and men don’t do the same things in the same way, what does that say about the numbers based “tech problem”.

From your linked article about co-authoring:

Coauthoring shows that a woman has a 40% chance of receiving tenure, compared with 75% for a man. Even prodigious output fails to tip the balance in favor of women. The chance of getting tenure by writing another paper increased by just 5.7%. When women have the only byline on multiple papers, that gap disappears.

Unfortunately, Sarsons wasn’t able to draw a clear conclusion about why women choose to coauthor. She says there’s no evidence to suggest that women are strategic about their choice of team members, although they are more likely to partner with other women than men are.

Overall, the results suggest that women either do not know that there is a coauthor penalty and therefore do not choose coauthors strategically, or that the benefit to coauthoring is sufficiently high such that women will take the coauthor penalty to produce a better paper. Another possibility is that they do not know their own ability and therefore coauthor as they think they are low ability.

It always comes down to the numbers, my friend.

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