Analyzing citation impact of IS research by women and men: do women have higher levels of research impact?

Over the past decade, the SIG MIS conference has become a leading venue for research on gender issues in the IT workforce. The question of women's research impact relative to men is important for several reasons. First, if research by women is not cited as often as that of men, it would be necessary to ask why. In that case, the explanation may be due to the fact that women publish their work in venues that are less visible relative to men; because women publish on topics that draw less interest from a broad audience (resulting in fewer subsequent studies that cite their work); or that women's research, as a whole, is of lower quality than that of men. Conversely, if research by women IS scholars is cited more often than research by men, it is again worth asking why: is it because women (as a whole) publish in more visible, higher-quality venues than men, because women publish on topics that interest a broader audience, because their research addresses more timely or controversial topics, or their research is of higher quality, relative to men? We test various hypotheses to show that papers published by women in five leading IS journals are cited more frequently than papers by men, after controlling for the journal and the subject matter of the papers. The effect is small, but significant. We conclude that this is because (a) women publish in MIS Quarterly at a higher rate relative to men -- which happens to be the IS journal that receives the most citations; (b) women are under-represented among authors in three journals that receive fewer citations; and (c) women generally publish few papers on topics that receive the lowest rates of citations.