Page 1 Collaboration and Gender in Science: Evidence from STAR METRICS Data

Collaboration and Gender in Science: Evidence from STAR METRICS Data Michele Pezzoni, Jacques Mairesse, Paula Stephan and Julia Lane Teams have been shown to affect productivity, be it that of soccer players, supermarket checkers, or fruit pickers. Science is no exception (Jones et al., 2008). In science, however, much of the study of teams has focused on the interactions of Principal Investigators in publications and patents. Yet scientific teams are largely populated by graduate students and postdoctoral fellows (Black and Stephan, 2010), an increasing proportion of whom are female. Understanding how graduate students and postdoctoral fellows participate in research teams is important because it sheds light on an additional dimension of productivity: a trainee’s work on a research team reflects an implicit contract with a university in which she works with faculty to produce research at the same time that she learns by doing. Thus, knowledge is disseminated not