Spsp homework

Article

Some Evidence for a Gender Gap in Personality and Social Psychology

Adam J. Brown1 and Jin X. Goh1

Abstract

This research examined a possible gender gap in personality and social psychology. According to membership demographics from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), women and men are represented near parity in the field. Yet despite this equal representation, the field may still suffer from a different type of gender gap. We examined the gender of first authors in two major journals, citations to these articles, and gender of award recipients. In random samples of five issues per year across 10 years (2004–2013; N ¼ 1,094), 34% of first authors in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology were women and 44% of first authors in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin were women. Articles authored by men were cited more than those authored by women. In examining the gender of award recipients given by SPSP (2000–2016), on average, 25% of the recipients were women.

Keywords

social psychology, personality, gender gap, bibliometric

It is no longer newsworthy that women enter psychology at a

higher rate than men do. In 2013, women represented 72.2% of all doctorates in psychology (National Science Foundation

[NSF], 2015a). This is remarkable considering that in 1958 (the

earliest data available), women only represented 18.0% of all doctorates in psychology. This impressive growth in represen-

tation is pervasive across most subfields of psychology, includ-

ing social psychology, with 67.3% of doctorates being awarded to women in 2013.1 Membership in the Society for Personality

and Social Psychology (SPSP), the field’s largest professional

society, likewise reflects this distribution: 51% of the SPSP members are female, 38% are male, and 11% did not report their gender in the most recent membership survey. Of the

89% of all members who specified their gender, 57% are female and 43% are male. While these numbers are not defini- tive, they do provide a good snapshot of the field’s gender com-

position, and this distribution is a cause for celebration. After

all, it stands in marked contrast to other fields such as science,

technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), where

women are severely underrepresented (NSF, 2015b). Yet despite

this progress for equal representation, there is reason to believe

that social and personality psychology may still suffer from a

gender gap. The current article presents evidence that even

though women and men are represented equally in social psy-

chology and personality in terms of participation, they are nev-

ertheless underrepresented as authors and underrecognized as

award recipients. The remainder of this article assumes that at

least half of the individuals participating in social and personal-

ity psychology are women, but based on the SPSP demographic

statistics, this estimate may be conservative.

The attrition of women in STEM fields is a highly conten-

tious and debated issue as evidenced by a literature revealing

mixed findings. While some research has demonstrated that the

gender gap in STEM can be attributed to social and environ-

mental factors such as gender bias, other work reveals no

advantage for either gender and even occasional advantages for

women in STEM. For example, in a field experiment, STEM

faculty members were either given a résumé for a lab manager

position with a male name or a female name. Both male and

female STEM professors were more likely to hire the male can-

didate over the female candidate for the lab manager position

even though the candidates had identical credentials (Moss-

Racusin, Dovidio, Brescoll, Graham, & Handelsman, 2012).

On the other hand, Williams and Ceci (2015) found that female

applicants for tenure-track positions in biology, engineering,

and psychology were preferred over male applicants despite

identical credentials.

In another study, faculty members received an e-mail from a

prospective doctoral student to schedule a meeting on the same

day or a week later. The student’s race and gender were

manipulated by using names that are stereotypically associated

with a specific race or gender, but the content of the message

remained identical across names. When the prospective

1 Department of Psychology, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Adam J. Brown, Department of Psychology, Northeastern University, 360

Huntington Ave., Boston, MA 02215, USA.

Email: brown.ad@husky.neu.edu

Social Psychological and Personality Science 2016, Vol. 7(5) 437-443 ª The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1948550616644297 spps.sagepub.com

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

http://spps.sagepub.com

students asked to meet in 1 week, faculty members were faster

and more likely to respond to, as well as more likely to agree to

meet with, Caucasian males relative to racial minorities and

women. However, in the same-day condition, faculty members

were equally likely to reject meeting Caucasian male students

and other students (Milkman, Akinola, & Chugh, 2012). A

follow-up study using the same data set found that the magni-

tude of the promale and pro-Caucasian biases for the appoint-

ment request 1 week later varied across disciplines, but

nevertheless existed across many different fields of study,

including a category labeled ‘‘social sciences,’’ which

included behavioral, clinical, and education/school psychol-

ogy (Milkman, Akinola, & Chugh, 2015). Additionally, hav-

ing a greater proportion of a minority group, either at the

faculty level or in the undergraduate population, did not

weaken the pro-Caucasian male bias. Finally, and perhaps

most critically, a shared racial or gender identity between the

student and faculty member did not attenuate the bias against

women and most minority groups. Together, these studies

suggest that women and minorities, in comparison to Cauca-

sian men, may face greater barriers to entry in academia.

However, contradictory research has concluded that

‘‘although in the past, gender discrimination was an important

cause of women’s underrepresentation in scientific academic

careers, this claim has continued to be invoked after it has

ceased being a valid cause of women’s underrepresentation

in math-intensive fields’’ (Ceci, Ginther, Kahn, & Williams,

2014, p. 76).

Insights From Other Fields

To measure the pervasiveness of the gender gap in various

fields, researchers have conducted large-scale bibliometric

analyses in which journal authors’ genders are coded. One of

these efforts relied upon the entire JSTOR corpus (a digital

archive of published scholarly research) from 1545 to 2011,

encompassing approximately 1.5 million articles from a variety

of disciplines in the sciences and humanities (West, Jacquet,

King, Correll, & Bergstrom, 2013). Overall, women accounted

for only 21.9% of first authors in this entire body of work, which is likely due to the centuries in which women were not

permitted to practice science, among other factors. However,

narrowing the scope of articles to 1990–2011 still reveals that

women are underrepresented in the first author position,

accounting for only 27.2% of first authorships. This work also demonstrated that this gap in publishing occurred both in

fields that continue to be male dominated (e.g., mathematics)

and in fields that approach parity in participation (e.g.,

education).

A second bibliometric analysis, using over 5 million articles

published between 2008 and 2012 drawn from Thomson Reu-

ters’ Web of Science database, found that men were more

likely to be the first, last, or sole author on an article compared

to women (Larivière, Ni, Gingras, Cronin, & Sugimoto, 2013).

This research also found that articles with women in these

positions are cited less frequently than those that have males

occupying them.

Both of these studies reinforce the notion that women are

not equally represented in science in terms of publications and

impact. In male-dominated fields such as mathematics and

computer science, one should not be surprised by a gender gap

in publication rates due to gender differences in participation.

On the other hand, a gender gap in publications within person-

ality and social psychology would be unexpected because the

field supposedly has equal representation of men and women.

It is for this reason that the current work adopts a bibliometric

approach to assess publication in two of the top journals in

social and personality psychology.

Personality and Social Psychology

The current research is not the first to suggest that a gender gap

exists in publication within social and personality psychology.

Tesser and Bau (2002) identified the most frequently cited

researchers using two handbooks of social psychology (both

were published before the year 2000) and noted that only 18

of these 106 ‘‘most frequently mentioned contributors’’ were

women. The study was conducted at the turn of the century and

as the authors noted, there may have been a cohort effect stem-

ming from when men outnumbered women in the field.

Another study investigated the nature of the field by conduct-

ing a bibliometric analysis of the field’s flagship journal, Jour-

nal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP), from 1965 to

2000 (Quinones-Vidal, Lopez-Garcia, Penaranda-Ortego, &

Tortosa-Gil, 2004). Among the most productive authors in

JPSP, there was no overlap in terms of number of articles pub-

lished between male and female authors. Of the top 30 most

productive male authors, each of these authors had published

from 21 to 51 articles in JPSP. But of the top 23 most produc-

tive female authors, the number of published articles only ran-

ged from 12 to 20.

Using the list of the 53 most productive researchers (as mea-

sured by JPSP output) identified by Quinones-Vidal, Lopez-

Garcia, Penaranda-Ortego, and Tortosa-Gil (2004), Cikara,

Rudman, and Fiske (2012) confirmed the gender gap in JPSP

authorship from 1965 to 2004. Overall, the 23 most productive

women previously identified still published less and at a slower

annual rate at JPSP compared to their male counterparts. Fur-

ther analyses by each decade also suggested that the gender gap

in JPSP was not due to a cohort effect. Despite increasing par-

ticipation of women in the field as members, reviewers, and

editors, women still published in the flagship journal less and

at a slower rate than men, leading the authors to conclude that

the JPSP gender gap did not seem to be closing. Nevertheless,

these findings are based solely on 53 researchers in the United

States (roughly 1% of current SPSP members) and their JPSP output. It is unclear if the gender gap in authorship is pervasive

throughout the field as well as its generalizability to other jour-

nals. As JPSP authorship is not the only indicator of success,

other measures are also necessary.

438 Social Psychological and Personality Science 7(5)

Current Research

The present article expanded on these findings in several ways.

First, rather than examining a subset of the most prolific social

and personality psychologists, random samples of five issues

per year across 10 years (2004–2013) from two top journals,

JPSP and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (PSPB),

were selected to examine a possible gender gap in authorship.

Second, the citation counts for the selected papers were

retrieved from Web of Science to assess a possible gender dif-

ference in scholarly impact postpublication. Finally, the gender

of award recipients was coded to investigate a possible gender

gap in recognition of scholarly achievements. The current

research is exploratory.

Method

Coding of Authorships

For the years 2004–2013, we randomly selected five issues (via

random number generator) within each year separately in JPSP

and PSPB, thus yielding 100 issues and over 1,000 articles in

the total sample. Review articles, corrections, theory articles,

and other types of published contributions were not included.

For each empirical article, we coded the gender of the first and

last author.2 Any sole authors were included as first authors. An

author’s gender was determined by inspecting the gender

stereotypicality of the first name, visiting the researcher’s

departmental and personal webpage or performing Internet

searches using Google.

The JPSP yielded 565 empirical articles, but two of these

articles could not be coded due to gender ambiguous names and

a lack of Internet record that would reveal gender (e.g., per-

sonal webpage, profile on lab/university webpage, etc.), leav-

ing a sample of 563 articles to be coded. The corresponding

10-year period in PSPB yielded a sample of 531 articles.

Coding of Citations

Each article selected for authorship coding was submitted to

Web of Science to obtain the number of times that each of these

articles had been cited since publication. We also coded the

first author’s institution at the time of publication either as USA

or international for exploratory purposes to examine if there is a

tendency to cite researchers based in the United States.

Coding of Award Recipients

SPSP recognizes the contributions and outstanding scholarly

achievements made by social and personality psychologists

on an annual basis. The recipients of these awards are nomi-

nated and selected by their peers. Therefore, award recipients

recognized by SPSP are deemed elite researchers, and this pro-

vides us with opportunity to code for gender gap in recognition

of achievement.

To avoid a small N, only awards that have had at least 10

recipients since 2000 were coded, which resulted in six

available awards.3 These awards were the Jack Block Award

for distinguished research in personality (2000–2015), the

Donald T. Campbell Award in social psychology (2000–

2015), the Career Contribution Award (2011–2015), the Carol

and Ed Diener Awards in social and personality (2007–2015),

the SAGE Young Scholars Awards (2008–2016), and the

Daniel M. Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize (2002–2015).

The Diener Awards for social and personality psychology were

combined to yield a larger sample. Gender of recipients was

determined using the same procedure outlined for authorship.

All data were retrieved from the Foundation for Personality and

Social Psychology and SPSP websites; full award descriptions

and names of award recipients can be found on these websites

as well.

We report how we determined our sample size, all data

exclusions, and all measures in this study. See https://osf.io/

5d7ra/ for all coded data on authorships, citations, and award

recipients.

Results

Authorships

JPSP. Of the 563 JPSP articles coded for first author gender, women were first authors on 193 articles (34%) and this was significantly below the expected frequency of equal distribu-

tion (i.e., equal frequency of male and female authors), w2(1, N ¼ 563) ¼ 55.65, p < .001. The smallest percentage was for 2004, when 22% of the coded articles had women as first authors. The highest percentage occurred in 2012, with 43% of the coded articles having a female author (see Figure 1).

Additionally, there was a positive, albeit nonsignificant, rela-

tionship between the year and percentage of women first

authors, r(8) ¼ .47, p ¼ .171, suggesting that the gender gap may be narrowing as the years progress.

PSPB. Of the 531 PSPB articles coded for first author gender, women were first authors on 236 articles (44%) and this was significantly below the expected frequency of equal