Is Team Formation Gender Neutral? Evidence from coauthorship patterns.

Abstract

We model the formation of teams as a random matching process influenced by the agents’ preferences for team size and gender composition. We test hypotheses regarding gender and team preferences on the patterns of coauthorship in articles published 1991-2002 in three top economic journals. We find that the female/male gap in the probability of having a female coauthor increases with the proportion of female authorships in the field. This, together increases with the finding that women single author significantly more than men and that female single authorship declines more than male ditto as the share of women increases, allows us to reject gender neutrality in team formation in favour of an hypothesis stating that the fraction of individuals who prefer teaming up with their own sex is larger that the fraction who prefer the opposite sex.team formation; gender preference; segregation; coauthorship patterns