Editing a Woman's Voice

Do societal pressures encourage women to be more uncertain than their male counterparts? We explore this question in the context of academic publishing, by examining the evolution of cautionary language used in manuscripts over the course of the review process. Comparing pre-submission versions of manuscripts to their published versions reveals a robust pattern: in first drafts of academic manuscripts, male and female authors write with similar levels of uncertainty. However, when we trace those early drafts to their published versions, an 11 point gap in uncertainty arises. We take a multi-method approach to isolate the role of gender in changes in uncertainty, including extensive control variables and fixed effects, and by training an NLP model to simulate all-else-equal counterfactual observations. Finally, we explore the role of individual editors in contributing to the gender gap in changes in uncertainty; we do so by constructing a network of author-to-editor matches that allow us to extract editor-specific fixed effects, capturing how a particular editor influences female-authored papers relative to male-authored papers (the editor's author-gender gap). We find considerable variation in editors' author-gender gaps and find that these editor-specific effects account for significant variation in the changes in uncertainty of an article through the review process. Finally, we show that an editor's author-gender gap correlates with observable editor characteristics such as societal norms in their country-of-origin, their work history, and the year that they obtained their PhD. Overall, our study speaks to the critical role of editors in shaping how female academics communicate.