ArticleScience advances2021
The unequal impact of parenthood in academia.
Article in Science advances, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 76 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
76 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Parenthood and care in academia: Publication counts, self-assessed productivity, and gendered differences.PloS one · 2026Pooled it
- Exploring Gender Bias in Six Key Domains of Academic Science: An Adversarial Collaboration.Psychological science in the public interest : a journal of the American Psychological Society · 2023Pooled it
- Underrepresentation of women in computer systems research.PloS one · 2022Trial
- Article
- Devaluation underlies gendered US faculty departures across disciplines and institutions.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Pregnancy and Motherhood Experiences of Turkish Women Anaesthesiologists in Training and Work Life.Turkish journal of anaesthesiology and reanimation · 2026Article
- Ten simple rules for postdoctoral mums to stay competitive in academia.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Nurturing the Nurturer: How to Understand and Support the Needs of Academic Women Child Psychiatrists.Academic psychiatry : the journal of the American Association of Directors of Psychiatric Residency Training and the Association for Academic Psychiatry · 2026Article
- Gender shapes the relationship between productivity and journal prestige in science.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Network inequality through preferential attachment, triadic closure, and homophily.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Researcher population pyramids: Tracking demographic and gender trajectories across countries.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Structural barriers drive gender inequality across academic careers in Brazilian ecology.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Nurturing empowered scholars: A student perspective on contemporary feminist mentorship.Feminism & psychology · 2026Article
- Persistent gender disparities in research productivity among U.S. reproductive endocrinologists: a cross-sectional analysis.Journal of assisted reproduction and genetics · 2026Article
- Mentorship as a Mechanism for Equity, Retention & Scientific Innovation in Neuroscience-related Careers.Oxford open neuroscience · 2026Article
- Early-career researchers in Chile: findings from a national survey on conditions, challenges, and institutional perceptions.Frontiers in research metrics and analytics · 2026Article
- Article
- Girls just wanna have funds: a new Transparent Reporting Scale for evaluating grant data reporting from funding agencies.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2026Article
- The best time to become a parent: The relationship between tenure and fertility among academics.PloS one · 2026Article
- Students in global traumatic stress research: an opportunity for meaningful and equitable involvement.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2025Article
16 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Across academia, men and women tend to publish at unequal rates. Existing explanations include the potentially unequal impact of parenthood on scholarship, but a lack of appropriate data has prevented its clear assessment. Here, we quantify the impact of parenthood on scholarship using an extensive survey of the timing of parenthood events, longitudinal publication data, and perceptions of research expectations among 3064 tenure-track faculty at 450 Ph.D.-granting computer science, history, and business departments across the United States and Canada, along with data on institution-specific parental leave policies. Parenthood explains most of the gender productivity gap by lowering the average short-term productivity of mothers, even as parents tend to be slightly more productive on average than nonparents. However, the size of productivity penalty for mothers appears to have shrunk over time. Women report that paid parental leave and adequate childcare are important factors in their recruitment and retention. These results have broad implications for efforts to improve the inclusiveness of scholarship.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.