The Gender Gap in Scholarly Self-Promotion on Social Media
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Self-promotion of research papers on social media is ubiquitous but not exercised to the same extent by every scholar. It is unclear whether there are gender differences in the frequency of self-promotion or the benefit it yields for individuals. Here, we examine differences in women's and men's scholarly self-promotion using 23 million Tweet mentions of 2.8 million research papers published between 2013 and 2018 by 3.5 million authors. Our analysis shows that women are significantly less likely (27%) than men to promote their papers, even after controlling for a number of important factors, including publication year, journal impact, affiliation rank, author productivity, number of citations, authorship position, number of coauthors, and research topics. In addition, women's underrepresentation on Twitter only explains a small portion of the observed gender difference in self-promotion, as the disparity exists even among authors active on Twitter. The magnitude of the gender gap is more strongly associated with papers' journal impact factor than with authors' affiliation rank, previous productivity, or academic discipline. In particular, men are 78% more likely than comparable women scholars to self-promote papers published in journals with very high impact factor (IF ≥ 40), whereas the difference is only 33% for papers in low-impact score journals (IF ≤ 5). Furthermore, we find that women face a “dilemma” in online science dissemination – while they promote their research less often than men on social media, they risk receiving less of a boost in attention than men if they do self-promote. Our findings offer the first large-scale evidence for a gender gap in scholarly self-promotion online and show the circumstances under which the gap is most substantial, helping inform policy to mitigate discrepancies in visibility and recognition.
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