Somewhere in the last few days there was a report of a study on discrimination against women scholars. As I remember it, in economics, if a paper has multiple authors, their names are listed alphabetically. In physics (?), the convention is to list the primary author first.
I wonder why those different conventions arose in the first place: chance, some difference in the way papers are developed between the two disciplines, something else? Anyhow, the bottom line is: in economics a woman who is part of a team of authors gets no credit for her work. (Credit was determined by counting the publications according to sole-authorship versus team, then seeing the correlation between no. of pubs and the academic position achieved.) Only sole author pubs helped a woman economist. In physics there was no such impact.
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