Is there a differentiated gender effect of collaboration with supercited authors? Evidence from early-career economists

Several inequalities between genders have been reported over the last decades in academia. Female researchers tend to have a lower pay, write fewer articles and receive fewer cites than their male counterparts, among other disparities. Co-authorship with highly cited scholars tend to give an advantage to early career researchers. Indeed, the impact of researchers that collaborate with super-cited (SC) authors at their early career stage tends to be greater than for those scientists who do not. The question of whether this advantage is favors male or female scientists has not been addressed yet. By conditioning on career length (at least ten years), we study the effect on male and female economists from collaborating with a SC author within the first five years of their career. Since collaboration is not likely random, we employ a matching model using pre-collaboration network characteristics to compare similar authors. We find a positive effect on the impact and the probability of being SC afterward; however, this effect is not statistically different between men and women. On the productivity side, we do not find an effect for any gender. To further explore these results, we study whether repeated collaboration with SC co-authors may be a possible mechanism in the years that follow.