Carolina Biliotti is an applied economist and a Max Weber Fellow at the EUI Department of Economics. Her work explores gender dynamics in authorship and recognition, with a focus on scientific innovation and rapidly evolving research fields. She specialises in the "science of science"—the study of how scientific knowledge is produced and how credit and recognition are distributed through publications, citations, and other rewards.
In this interview, Carolina discusses her working paper ‘Breaking new ground, reinforcing old gaps: gender disparities in access to emerging research frontiers’, co-authored with Luca Verginer and Massimo Riccaboni. Their study reveals how the sudden emergence of a new scientific frontier affects the gender gap in key authorship roles. This phenomenon reinforces systemic barriers in the most innovative fields—from the rapid response to COVID-19 in 2020 to the current proliferation of research on AI nowadays.
In academia, authorship order is more than just a list of names. Why is securing a “key authorship position” so important for a scholar’s career, particularly for early-career researchers and for women in science?
In fields like economics, the authors of a paper are listed in alphabetical order. However, other disciplines—such as the biomedical sciences—use non-alphabetical ordering. In these cases, the first and last positions are the ones that carry the most weight for a scientist’s career progression.
In biomedicine, the focal field of our study, research teams are typically large, and roles are defined by author placement on a published paper. By convention, the first author is the researcher who led the project and conducted the core research, often an early-career scientist, while the last author is the senior team member—the head of the laboratory or the scientist who provided oversight and secured the funding.
We refer to the first and last authors as those holding key authorship positions or high-visibility scientific roles. Existing evidence shows these positions are not equally distributed across genders, with women underrepresented in these lead roles. This creates a compounding disadvantage: Missing the opportunity to be a first author on a paper about an emerging research field prevents a scientist from demonstrating that she led the research. This results in reduced citations and fewer opportunities later, creating a permanent lag in her career trajectory.
Our research focuses specifically on how gender disparities in leadership-associated roles in publishing teams emerge at the earliest stages of engagement with a novel, high-attention research frontier.
Your research uses the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study. Why was this global crisis a perfect “laboratory” for studying scientific frontiers?
We did not look at COVID-19 as a medical crisis, but as the perfect example of an emerging, high-attention research frontier, characterised by urgency, uncertainty, and flexible team formation.
In 2020, at the onset of the pandemic, publishing scientific papers on topics closely related to COVID-19 —such as epidemiology or pneumonia—granted immediate visibility for scientists. We assessed the presence of women scientists in key roles within these “high-relevance” publications and compared it with publications in fields minimally affected by the pandemic, such as brain mapping.
In practical terms, this meant analysing 2019 and 2020 publications indexed in PubMed, a vast repository of biomedical research. Using research topics assigned to the publications by PubMed experts—rather than the authors themselves—we measured the “COVID-relatedness”, comparing papers on topics closely tied to the virus (such as vaccines, pneumonia, and ageusia, the condition in which people lose the sense of taste) against those minimally affected by it. We focused on these two extremes, leaving out those in the middle as they could confuse our findings. Finally, we examined the research teams behind those papers, with a specific focus on whether a woman or a man was designated as the first author.
Your findings reveal that emerging research frontiers can widen gender gaps in top authorship roles. Why does this happen? Conversely, what factors did you identify that help women break through into high-visibility authorship positions?
In 2020, competition was fierce as teams of scientists raced to be the first to publish on matters related to COVID-19. Existing literature suggests that women were broadly disadvantaged in science during the pandemic, but our research reveals a more nuanced divide.
Before the pandemic, papers in fields that would later contribute to COVID-19 research (e.g., vaccines, pneumonia, epidemiology) had roughly balanced gender representation among first authors. After the outbreak, there was a disproportionate surge in COVID-related papers with men as first authors.
In biomedical papers on non-COVID related topics published in 2020, the probability of a woman holding the first-author position increased by 2.1 percentage points, and by 1.9 percentage points for last authorship. In contrast, COVID-19 related papers—the “frontier” topic of that moment— experienced a relative decline: The share of women first authors was 7 percentage points lower, and that of women last authors 5.7 percentage points lower relative to the change observed in non-COVID papers. This suggests that there was a sharp decline in women’s key authorship positions in COVID-19 related topics, but not in other biomedical fields.
Interestingly, this disparity in COVID-related papers is not fully explained by the severity of lockdowns. COVID-related publications remain significantly less likely to have women in key authorship positions even after accounting for school and workplace closures. This suggests the disadvantage may relate to how women are positioned when a new, hyper-competitive research field suddenly emerges.
To understand these drivers, we analysed the teams behind COVID-related publications. We also looked at whether team members had prior expertise in the field of the publication and whether the first author and the last author had a history of collaboration.
Our research reveals that the decline in women’s first authorship was driven by a rise in “newcomer teams”. We define these as teams where both the first author and the last one lacked prior experience in the topic of the publication.
For example, consider two or more scientists co-authoring a paper on vaccines and engaging with this research topic for the first time in 2020. In some cases, this could have been an opportunistic move triggered by the massive shift in global attention and funding toward the pandemic. This high-visibility environment attracted many newcomer teams where neither the lead (first) author nor the senior (last) author had established authority in the subject.
Beyond subject expertise, a second factor that plays a role is prior collaboration. A history of working together can influence expectations of how researchers—men and women alike—will perform in a high-pressure environment. When authors have a proven track record, they are likely to partner again when a new research frontier emerges, potentially creating pathways for women to achieve high-visibility roles.
However, we discovered that prior collaboration alone does not guarantee a first-authorship position for newcomer women. The key lies in the interaction between two elements: When a senior author has both prior expertise in the field and a history of collaboration with a newcomer woman, the probability of her appearing as first author of COVID-related publications in 2020 increased significantly relative to COVID non-related biomedical publications.
In short, in a high-stakes, uncertain publishing environment, when teams form without established roles—and must organise under extreme time pressure—gender gaps are amplified, and women’s first authorship sharply declines. In contrast, senior researchers’ expertise in the field, combined with prior collaborations with women newcomers, can act as a buffer against gender disadvantage.
Based on your findings, what specific policy interventions should be prioritised to promote gender equality in scientific authorship?
Our research reveals that women are disadvantaged in newcomer teams publishing on frontier research topics. To counter this, scientific institutions, universities, labs, and journals should provide women with the resources needed to boost their visibility. For example, they could offer women scientists targeted opportunities to collaborate with established experts and provide the funding necessary to pivot into high-impact, emerging fields, ensuring that women are given equal opportunities to lead in emerging fields of research.
Another intervention could be to facilitate the inclusion of women in newcomer teams and foster more structured collaborations between scientists with different expertise, especially incumbents and newcomers. This would not only improve gender parity but also enhance the overall quality of the research.
The rapid expansion of AI today mirrors the frantic research pace of the 2020 pandemic. In both cases, the message is clear: The early stages of a research trend are where systemic barriers are most likely to take root. Unless we proactively safeguard access to lead authorship roles, women scientists will continue to face a compounding disadvantage that begins the moment an emerging research frontier is born.
Carolina Biliotti is an EUI Max Weber Fellow at the EUI Department of Economics. Her research interests lie at the intersection of causal inference, policy evaluation, and the science of science.
Read ‘Breaking new ground, reinforcing old gaps: gender disparities in access to emerging research frontiers’ by Carolina Biliotti, Luca Verginer, and Massimo Riccaboni, available on the EUI research repository Cadmus.