May 30, 2025

12pm EDT

Luddy AI 2005

Speaker: Jina Lee

Title: Selective Recognition: Gendered Recognition of Different Types of Scientific Novelty

Abstract: Gender disparities in scientific recognition are not uniform but vary systematically across types of novelty. This study introduces the concept of “selective recognition” to explain how gender shapes whose work is acknowledged as novel and in what ways. Analyzing 89,534 scientific papers, I examine how gendered recognition patterns differ for theoretical, methodological, and empirical novelty. Results show that men’s contributions are more likely to be validated as theoretical novelty, a domain marked by high interpretive uncertainty and culturally coded as masculine, while women’s contributions tend to be more recognized as empirical novelty, where standardized evaluation criteria and alignment with gendered expectations on women researchers facilitate more equitable recognition. Recognition of methodological novelty shows no significant gender gap, likely due to its lower interpretive uncertainty and the availability of objective performance benchmarks that buffer against status-based bias. My findings suggest that addressing gender inequity in science requires attention not only to demographic representation but also to the gendered evaluation practices surrounding different forms of scientific novelty. This study advances our understanding of status-based inequalities in scientific recognition and identifies potential avenues for institutional reform.

Biography: Jina Lee is a sociologist whose research investigates how gender shapes the evaluation and recognition of scientific knowledge. Using computational text analysis, bibliometric analysis, and survey experiments, she investigates how evaluation practices with seemingly neutral criteria often end up reproducing inequality in academia. Her ongoing work examines how gender influences which ideas are recognized as novel and whose contributions are deemed more credible under crisis. While her primary focus is on gender biases in scientific evaluation, she has extended her research to cultural and entrepreneurial domains, demonstrating the pervasive influence of status-based biases across multiple contexts. Her research is published in American Sociological Review, Socius, and Journal of Social Entrepreneurship.