When asked who is an expert in their field, men psychology researchers name significantly fewer women than their women colleagues do, a new study found. The results, reflecting men’s implicit bias, help explain why women are less likely than men to receive citations to their work or to be invited to speak at meetings and apply for jobs—even as more than 70% of Ph.D.s in the field were awarded to women in recent years.
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Lead author Veronica Yan, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, was inspired to do the study when she and her colleagues read a 2020 paper during a journal club showing that women psychology researchers publish and are cited less than their men counterparts, despite representing more than three-quarters of the workforce. None of them had previously researched gender bias, but intrigued by that paper, they decided to explore the reasons behind this gender citation gap, hypothesizing that perhaps it was due to a difference in who comes to mind when citing other colleagues’ work in research papers.