Comments on "The Gender Citation Gap in Undergraduate Student Research: Evidence from the Political Science Classroom"
PS Political Science & Politics recently published Liu et al. 2020 "The Gender Citation Gap in Undergraduate Student Research: Evidence from the Political Science Classroom". The authors use their study to discuss methods to address gender bias in citations among students:
To the extent that women, in fact, are underrepresented in undergraduate student research, the question becomes: What do we, as a discipline, do about this?...
However, Liu et al. 2020 do not establish that women authors were unfairly underrepresented in student research, because Liu et al. 2020 did not compare citation patterns to a benchmark of the percentage of women that should be cited in the absence of gender bias.
PS Political Science & Politics has an relevant article for benchmarking: Teele and Thelen 2017, in which Table 1 reports the percentage of authors who are women for research articles published from 2000 to 2015 in ten top political science journals. Based on that table, about 26.3% of authors were women.
The Liu et al. 2020 student sample had 75 male students and 65 female students,with male students citing 21.2% women authors and female students citing 33.1% women authors, so the percentage of women cited by the students overall was about 26.7% when weighted by student gender, which is remarkably close to the 26.3% benchmark.
There might be sufficient evidence to claim that the 95% confidence interval for male students does not contain the proper benchmark, and the same might be true for female students, but the 26.3% benchmark from Teele and Thelen 2017 might not be the correct benchmark: for example, maybe students wrote more on topics for which women have published relatively more, or maybe students drew from publications from before 2000 (during which women were a smaller percentage of political scientists than from 2000 to 2015). But the correct benchmark for inferring that women authors were unfairly underrepresented should have been addressed before PS published the final paragraph of Liu et al. 2020, with recommendations about how to address women's under-representation in undergraduate student research.