Gender and Collaboration

We connect gender disparities in research output and collaboration patterns in economics. We first document large gender gaps in research output. These gaps persist across 50 years despite a significant increase in the fraction of women in economics during that time. We further show that output differences are closely related to differences in the co-authorship networks of men and women: women have fewer collaborators, collaborate more often with the same co-authors, and a higher fraction of their co-authors collaborate with each other. Taking into account co-authorship networks reduces the gender output gap by 18%.