The Gender Gap in Scholarly Self-Promotion on Social Media

Self-promotion in science is ubiquitous but not exercised to the same extent by everyone. It is unclear whether there are gender differences in the frequency of self-promotion or the benefits individuals get from it. Here, we examine gender differences in scholarly self-promotion using 7M Tweet mentions of 539K research papers published in 2018 by 1.3M authors. Our analysis shows that female authors are significantly less likely than male authors to promote their papers, even after controlling for a number of important factors including journal impact, affiliation prestige, author productivity and number of citations, authorship position, number of coauthors, and research topics. The magnitude of the gender gap is more strongly impacted by papers' journal impact than by authors' affiliation prestige, their previous productivity, or academic discipline. In particular, male scholars are 60\% more likely to self-promote than comparable female scholars papers published in journals with very high impact factor, whereas the same probability is only 28\% for publications in low impact journals. Although women self-promote less often overall, when they do, their papers receive slightly more mentions on Twitter. Our findings offer the first large-scale evidence for the gender gap in scholarly self-promotion online and unpack details about the circumstances under which discrepancies in self-promotion are the most substantial, helping inform policy aimed at closing the gender gap in visibility and recognition.