Gender discrepancies in publication productivity of high-performing life science graduate students

Despite equal matriculation into life science graduate programs, the gender gap persists for later-stage professional outcomes. To understand this divergence, we examine graduate training and use the competitive NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program to identify high-quality life science students that are awardees and honorable mentions. We use a differencing research design to estimate the relative difference of the R&D award across gender on publication trajectory. The results of the triple difference estimation show a negative effect for women compared to men from the award. We investigate the driver of this effect by examining trends within gender and find a large, positive effect of the award for men but fail to find such evidence for female awardees. Our results indicate different signaling effects across gender even though the funding is meritocratic.