Exploring the relationship between gender and career outcomes for social scientists

Abstract

Purpose: The paper seeks to provide a structured review of the literature on gender and scholarly career outcomes in the social sciences and discuss its relevance to research on IS scholarship, in order to guide researchers who seek to conduct studies on the role of gender in academic IS careers.Design/methodology/approach: The authors review the literature to identify all published studies that compare (or theorize about) various academic career outcomes for men and women in the social sciences.Findings: In comparing the literature from the IS field with other social science disciplines, the authors conclude that gender has been entirely overlooked in studies of IS scholars' publication patterns and other career outcomes. Propositions are developed for researchers in order to guide future studies that examine the relationship between gender and academic career outcomes.Research limitations/implications: The paper focuses on studies that compare research productivity and other career outcomes for men and women in social science disciplines. Studies in other disciplines such as engineering, physical sciences, arts and humanities, are omitted. Studies that focus on women only or studies that examine the general antecedents to scholarly outcomes but which ignore gender are also excluded.Practical implications: This paper seeks to open up a discussion of gender as a valid issue for investigation regarding career outcomes for IS scholars. The authors seek to motivate other researchers to examine whether women are achieving parity in the IS academic field.Originality/value: This paper provides a comprehensive, structured literature review to systematically study whether gender plays a role in research productivity and other career outcomes for IS scholars.