The female finance penalty: Why are women less successful in academic finance than related fields?

Abstract

We study the publication patterns of male and female finance scholars, contrasting them with their counterparts in the related fields of accounting, economics and general management by analysing a large sample of more than 400,000 journal outputs spanning over two decades. We show that, in particularly stark contrast to accounting and management publications, women are vastly under-represented as authors of finance ones. Further, our results demonstrate that work produced by female finance academics is published in lower-rated journals and garners fewer citations, a phenomenon we refer to as the ‘female finance penalty’. We find that the topics on which women in academic finance work and the methodological approaches they use are highly associated with this penalty. In particular, we show that female finance authors are more likely to engage in interdisciplinary and qualitative work, and to investigate topics that are linked with lower research success. Moreover, when it comes to journal placement, we find that female-authored work in finance is ‘penalised’ more for its interdisciplinarity than that authored by men. Finally, we show that female finance authors are less likely to be affiliated to US-based or highly ranked institutions – factors that typically increase both publication success and future citation – and when they are, there is some evidence that their citation rates are less likely to benefit from these affiliations than those of their male colleagues.