Women playing by inefficient rules - Evidence from academia

``Leaky pipeline" phenomenon is often used to describe the decreasing presence of women at subsequent stages of academia in economics. In this paper, we explore whether women adopt an inefficient research strategy relative to men, that contributes to this phenomenon. We use a dataset comprising around 6000 research articles, published between October 2020 to March 2021 in 104 peer-reviewed economics journals, spanning ten research sub-fields within economics. Controlling for the quality of research article, Sarsons et al (2020) found that same paper may add different credit to a woman’s tenure depending on the gender composition of the team of coauthors. Given this bias, our associational results show that women are inefficiently producing 72% of their research in the two least rewarding publication types - coauthored with men and women in equal proportion or coauthored as women in minority proportion. The corresponding statistics for men is 20%. These statistics are consistent, with some variation, across research sub-fields and journal rankings. We present back-of-the-envelope calculations about the increase in women’s likelihood of tenure if they adopted men’s research strategy. We also discuss the supply-side and demand-side factors behind women’s observed research strategy.