New Evidence on the Relative Scholarly Productivity of Male versus Female Political Scientists

Considerable research finds that male political scientists publish more research on average than do female political scientists. Yet the reasons for this difference are not entirely clear. Those findings may also overestimate the relative productivity of men because they do not account for the longer time that more men have been in the profession and thus have been publishing longer than women. For a prominent survey dataset of political scientists, we demonstrate notable cohort differences in the research productivity of both men and women across time. Our results also indicate that the overall greater productivity of men results in part from senior women scholars not generally enjoying the same benefits of long tenure on their research output as men do.