When: Wednesday, March 16, 2022, 2:30 PM - 3:30 PMWhere: Online, Zoom
Speaker: Dr Erin Hengel
We are delighted to launch our new CGR seminar series ‘Diversity in Economics’, to present research on career obstacles and discrimination faced by female, ethnic minority and LGBTQ+ members of the academic economics profession.
Event Zoom link: https://qmul-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/89319106556
The host for the seminar is Professor Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay. Guest speaker Dr Erin Hengel is Research Fellow in Economics at UCL and will present her findings in a paper titled ‘’Gender and the time cost of peer review" (click on the hyperlink for the paper)
Dr Hengel is one of the core members of the Royal Economic Society’s Women’s Committee, and one of the authors of the RES’s report on the status of women in economics. In addition to studying gender discrimination in peer review, her research interests are law and economics, corporate finance and applied micro theory. She has an undergraduate degree from Hendrix College and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge.
In this paper, we investigate one factor that can directly contribute to — as well as indirectly shed light on the other causes of — the gender gap in academic publications: time spent in peer review. To study our problem, we link administrative data from an economics field journal with bibliographic and demographic information on the articles and authors it publishes. Our results suggest that in each round of review, referees spend 4.4 more days reviewing female-authored papers and female authors spend 12.3 more days revising their manuscripts. However, both gender gaps decline — and eventually disappear — as the same referee reviews more papers. This pattern suggests novice referees initially statistically discriminate against female authors; as their information about and confidence in the refereeing process improves, however, the gender gaps fall.