Hierarchical differences
Women of different social or professional “ranks” within academic departments collaborate less than men do, according to a new Harvard study, suggesting that female full professors prefer to work on academic papers with other female full professors rather than assistant professors. When the pool was narrowed to women of the same rank, collaboration was equal to that of men. The study’s authors are Joyce Benenson, an associate of Harvard’s Human Evolutionary Biology Department and a professor of psychology at Emmanuel College; Richard Wrangham, the Ruth B. Moore Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology; and Henry Markovits, a professor of psychology at the University of Quebec at Montreal. The work was described in a paper published March 3 in Current Biology. Benenson and Wrangham have been pursuing parallel lines of research over a number of years with both children and chimpanzees. Their studies demonstrate that males are more likely to interact in large groups...