Newsletter

April 2014

Senior female psychology professors are less likely than their male counterparts to cooperate with their junior, same-gender colleagues on research

Ryan Jacobs

Hackneyed gender tropes tell usthat men are hyper-competitive, egoistic
warriors who will fight to the death. Women, on the other hand, are deeply
concerned about interpersonal relationships, so they’re more likely to work
together as a unit than get in fist-fights and pissing matches.

But
how does intra-gender politics actually work in the real-world, beyond the lazy
stereotypes? Do women really collaborate together more than men?

According toa new studypublished inCurrent BiologybyJoyce Benenson,
a psychology professor at Emmanuel College and an associate at Harvard
University’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, and two of her
colleagues, the world of academia doesn’t conform to these clichés. Female and
male full professors at 50 university psychology departments across North
America actually “were equally likely” to collaborate with same-gender,
equal-rank colleagues on research papers.

But
when hierarchy is folded into the equation, behavior shifts radically.

The
researchers used “numbers of co-authored peer-reviewed publications” between
2008 to 2012 to measure the robustness of senior faculty members’ cooperation
with their younger colleagues. They calculated the expected number of
publications among full professors and their same-gender, junior colleagues,
based on chance and the position and gender compositions of the departments. The
team discovered that female full professors came in well below the random mark
for co-authorship with their younger, same-gender colleagues, while theirmale
counterparts exceeded expectations:

There were significantly fewer publications co-authored by one senior female
with one junior female than by one senior male with one junior male than would
be expected. … In contrast, analysis of co-authored publications between senior
and junior co-authors of the other gender yielded no difference…. These results
show that high-ranked male professors co-published morethan high-ranked female
professors with same-gender low-ranked faculty.

Our
results are consistent withobservations suggesting that socialstructure takes
differing forms forhuman males and females. Males’tendency to interact in
same-gendergroups make them more prone tocooperation with asymmetrically
rankedmales. In contrast, females’ tendency torestrict their same-gender
interactionsto equally ranked individuals makethem more reluctant to cooperate
withasymmetrically ranked females.

The
female preference for cooperation with equals has also been observed in other
studies of chimps and human infants, adolescents, and adults. Benenson suspects
there’s an evolutionary basis for the behavior. “Males benefit from cooperating
with groups to defeat other groups. Females invest more in kin and not in
unrelated individuals, except a best friend,” she explained in an email.

This lack of cross-rank cooperation seems particularly discouraging for young
female professors, who already have to compete in a system full of
institutionally- and societally-imposed handicaps. Recognizing and reversing
this trend may be one of many ways to work against the gender imbalanceamong
tenured professors.

Given the findings, I asked Benenson whether she wished she’d collaborated on
her paper with a junior female faculty member rather than two male colleagues.
She replied: “It is not so easy to do!”

Pacific Standard, March 4, 2014.