A matter of time? How absence from work affects gender gaps in research productivity

Studies examining gender and research productivity generally show that men produce significantly more publications than women. While controlling for academic position and scientific field reduces the gender gap, some disparity remains. We examine the extent to which accounting for time away from work can further close the gap. Previous studies indicate that women take longer leaves of absence than men, particularly in their early career years, although research productivity metrics normally measure publications produced over a calendar year without adjusting for how much the researcher was working during the previous year. We adjust for the time lost due to parental leaves and sick leaves longer than 2 weeks to examine how the total length of time away from work within a year affects research productivity. Coupling the publication records of 17,000 Norwegian academics with data on their leaves of absence, gender, age, and academic position, we find that while academic field and position explain most of the gender gap in research output, absence also has a distinct contribution: A 2-week absence reduces fractionalized publications by 0.01 the following year, which corresponds to approximately 1% of the mean for men and 1.7% of the mean for women. Each additional day of absence reduces fractionalized publications by another 0.001. Adjusting for absence represents a small but important piece of the puzzle and provides more evidence for the assertion that the more similar the conditions under which men and women produce research, the more similar their output.