Is Team Formation Gender Neutral? Evidence from Coauthorship Patterns

We model team formation as a random matching process influenced by agents’ preferences for team size and gender composition. We then test if the coauthorship pattern in articles published during 1991–2002 in three top economics journals is gender neutral, exploiting variation in female presence across subfields. Controlling for author, team, and field characteristics, we find that the gender gap in the propensity to coauthor with a woman increases in the presence of women in the subfield. We also find that women single author significantly more than men. These findings allow us to reject gender neutrality in team formation in economics.