New Medium, Same Story: Gender Gaps in Book Publishing

Abstract

Recent research points to a gender gap in journal article authorship: women are under-represented. Given that publishing a book remains central to many political scientists’ careers, in this paper we explore the extent to which gender publication and citation gaps also exist for books. We find that although the gender publication gap for university press books has narrowed over time, it remains larger than for journal articles. We also find that book authorship patterns do not reflect the shift towards coauthorship observed for journal articles. On the other hand, we find no
gender citation gap for books written by one woman. However, books coauthored by coed teams or teams of women receive far fewer citations than books written by one man or woman or by teams of men.