The Gender Gap in Citations: Does It Persist?

Abstract In the late 1970s and early 1980s, several researchers showed the importance, in the United States, of the number of times scholars' publications are cited for determining their bargaining power in academia. Not surprisingly, the question was soon raised whether citations are a good measure of scholarly merit. Are women at a disadvantage in male-dominated fields, such as economics? Studies had shown that authors tended to cite a larger proportion of publications by authors of the same gender. This paper examines whether women's disadvantage in garnering citations has been reduced by the increasing representation of women in economics and finds that this has been the case in both labor economics and economics in general, albeit not to the same degree.