Luisa Carrer (ESCP Business School)
Piera Bello and Alessandra Casarico
This paper studies gender differences in the consequences of negative shocks in science. We focus on research retractions - episodes that, although rare, carry significant implications for the credibility and career progression of involved scientists. We assemble a new dataset linking retraction records to the complete publication histories of all involved authors (1993-2020). Using NLP-based similarity measures applied to over 500,000 abstracts, we examine how retractions affect researchers' citations as well as the evolution of their research agendas. We document sizeable and persistent gender gaps in retraction penalties. Citations to prior work fall sharply after retraction, with female authors experiencing significantly larger losses than male co-authors from the same event. Retractions also lead authors to shift away from the topics of the retracted article, and this thematic change is substantially stronger for women. These gender gaps are not driven by gender differences in field, seniority, eminence, and are more pronounced in mixed-gender teams. Instead, we show that women face larger declines in productivity, reduced collaboration opportunities, and sustained citation penalties even for post-retraction work. The findings indicate that negative shocks amplify existing gender inequalities in science through both demand-side sanctions by the research community and supply-side adjustments in research behavior by retracted authors.