Gender & Collaboration

We connect gender disparities in research output and collaboration patterns in economics. We first document large gender gaps in research output. These output differences are closely related to differences in the co-authorship networks of men and women: women have fewer collaborators, collaborate more often with the same co-authors, and a higher fraction of their co-authors collaborate with each other. Taking into account co-authorship networks reduces the gender output gap by 21%. We show that gender output gap persists and the gender differences in collaboration networks are stable, despite the significant increase in the fraction of women in economics. This suggests that gender homophily plays a minor role in shaping collaboration.