Article: Wide Social Influence and the Emergence of the Unexpected: An Empirical Test Using Spotify Data | Sociological Science | Posted October 23, 2025

(Forthcoming Article) - We assess whether men and women are treated differently when presenting their economics research. We collected data across thousands of seminars, job market talks and conferenc...

We investigated the extent to which the COVID-19 pandemic impacted long-standing gender inequalities in Dutch academia. Dutch academia is an ideal case to gain insight on exacerbated gender differentials due to COVID-19 on employees, because men and women face comparable institutional contexts and any COVID-19 impact becomes visible and measurable fast through potentially decreased yearly publications. We reconstructed the complete publishing careers up till 2022 of more than 8000 Dutch scientists who received a PhD from 1990 onwards and still had an active publication career before the pandemic started. We compared the publication dip between men and women during COVID-19. Our data allowed us to investigate whether the gendered impact of COVID-19 varied across research domains, different PhD cohorts and type of research output. We consistently find that COVID-19 did not have more severe consequences on research output for women than for men.

The percentage of women in academia is still lower than what would be expected statistically, especially in the sciences and among faculty (tenured professors). Theories on network closure suggest tha...

Paper output varies between disciplines, as does the trend after tenure is achieved.

The resurgence of wolves in Germany has sparked intense debate, particularly in rural areas where wolf attacks on livestock are frequent. Prior resear…