Peng Hao, Teplitskiy Misha, Romero Daniel M, Horvát Emőke-Ágnes
Department of Data Science, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China.
School of Information, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109, USA.
Nat Commun. 2025 Jul 1;16(1):5552. doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-60590-y.
Self-promotion in science is ubiquitous but may not be exercised equally by everyone. Research on self-promotion in other domains suggests that, partly due to adverse reactions to non-gender-conforming career-enhancing behaviors, women tend to self-promote less often than men. We test whether this pattern extends to online spaces by examining scholarly self-promotion over six years using 23M tweets about 2.8M research papers authored by 3.5M scientists. We find that, overall, women are about 28% less likely than men to self-promote their papers on Twitter (now X) despite accounting for important confounds. The differential adoption of Twitter does not fully explain the gender gap in self-promotion, which is large even in relatively gender-balanced research areas, where adversity is expected to be smaller. Moreover, we find that the gender gap increases with higher performance and academic status, being most pronounced for research-prolific women from top-ranked institutions who publish papers in high-impact journals. We also find differential returns with respect to gender: while self-promotion is associated with increased tweets of papers compared to no self-promotion, the increase is slightly smaller for women than for men. Our findings reveal that scholarly self-promotion online varies meaningfully by gender and can contribute to a measurable gender gap in the visibility of scientific ideas.
在科学界，自我推销现象普遍存在，但并非每个人的表现都相同。对其他领域自我推销的研究表明，部分由于对不符合性别规范的职业发展行为存在不良反应，女性自我推销的频率往往低于男性。我们通过分析350万名科学家撰写的280万篇研究论文的2300万条推文，来检验这种模式是否也适用于网络空间，研究时间跨度为六年。我们发现，总体而言，尽管考虑了重要的混杂因素，但女性在推特（现称X）上自我推销论文的可能性比男性低约28%。推特使用情况的差异并不能完全解释自我推销方面的性别差距，即使在性别相对平衡的研究领域，这种差距也很大，而在这些领域中，预期的不利因素较小。此外，我们发现，随着科研表现和学术地位的提高，性别差距会增大，对于来自顶尖机构、在高影响力期刊上发表论文的高产女性研究人员来说，这种差距最为明显。我们还发现了性别方面的不同回报：与不进行自我推销相比，自我推销与论文推文数量的增加有关，但女性的增加幅度略小于男性。我们的研究结果表明，网络学术自我推销在性别上存在显著差异，并可能导致科学观点可见性方面可衡量的性别差距。
