Male researchers call their work 'novel' more often than women

Male scientists are more likely than their female counterparts to use superlatives like “first” or “novel” to describe their work, a new study suggests, and this disparity might contribute to other professional gender gaps, the authors say.

The study team analyzed the language used in more than 6 million papers in peer-reviewed medical and scientific journals to see how often the findings were described with any of 25 words that have positive connotations, such as “excellent,” “unique,” “promising” and “remarkable.” Papers with male lead authors were up to 21% more likely than those with female lead authors to use positive framing - language that casts the findings as highly significant - in titles and abstracts, the analysis found.

And papers that used positive framing had up to 13% more citations by other scientists than papers without this language.

“Since citations are a key determinant in hiring and promotion decisions, gender differences in language use may have tangible career implications,” said lead study author Marc Lerchenmueller of the University of Mannheim in Germany.

“Women’s work may receive less attention and recognition as a result of them using more timid language,” Lerchenmueller said by email. “Framing may influence what research gets noticed and what science may ultimately inform patient care.” Women in academic medicine and life sciences tend to receive fewer promotions, earn lower salaries, and receive fewer research grants than their male counterparts, the study team notes in The BMJ.

While the analysis wasn’t designed to prove whether or how the wording of research papers might impact scientists’ career trajectories over time, it’s possible that using more muted language holds women back, the study team notes.

To account for changes in language over time and different approaches at different journals, researchers compared papers in the same publication, and from the same year with one another, and the results held up.

They also compared papers with similar approaches to investigating similar topics - such as clinical trials for cancer treatments - to account for differences in describing different types of research.

One limitation of the study is that Lerchenmueller’s team was unable to objectively determine the scientific merits of the studies in their analysis, making it unclear whether men produced more novel work than women or if men set a lower bar for declaring their work unique.

Social norms may play a role, said Rosemary Morgan, of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.

“Male researchers are more likely to describe their work as ground-breaking or novel compared to female research not because men are more confident than women, but because women are penalized when they demonstrate typical ‘masculine’ traits like assertiveness,” Morgan, who wasn’t involved in the study, said by email.

“Women are often expected to show more feminine traits like empathy and being modest, or risk being seen as less likeable and not a team player,” Morgan added. “This leads to women promoting themselves and their work less than men, which can negatively affect their career progression.” Journals may unintentionally perpetuate existing gender bias if they don’t put procedures in place to make the wording of published papers gender neutral, Morgan said. To avoid this, journals could create strict criteria research must meet for scientists to describe the work as “first” or “novel” or use other common superlatives.

“This could have the effect of ensuring more women describe their research that way, or limiting the number of men who do,” Morgan said.