Study: The gender gap in scholarly self-promotion on social media (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-60590-y)
Many women scientists are staying silent online-and it could be costing them professionally.
A new University of Michigan study finds that women are about 28% less likely than men to promote their scientific papers on X (formerly Twitter)-a seemingly minor digital decision that could have big implications for professional advancement, recognition and pay.
The study controlled for key factors such as research field, institutional affiliation and social media use and still found a persistent, wide gender gap. Surprisingly, the gap holds strong even in disciplines where gender balance is more equitable and overt bias is expected to be lower, the researchers say.
Even more striking: The gap widens as women climb the ladder.
The scientists least likely to promote their work? High-performing women from elite institutions publishing in top-tier journals-the very researchers who have the most to gain from increased visibility.
"This isn't just about tweets. It's about who gets seen, cited and celebrated in science," said study co-author Daniel Romero, associate professor of information, complex systems, and electrical engineering and computer science.
The gender gap increases with higher performance and status, being most pronounced for productive women from top-ranked institutions who publish papers in high-impact journals.
Romero and colleagues examined scholarly self-promotion over six years using 23 million tweets about 2.8 million research papers authored by 3.5 million scientists.
The findings raised concerns about the dominant norms of academic social media, which often reward traditionally masculine styles of self-presentation-potentially deterring women from engaging at all. Universities, funding agencies and hiring committees should consider the hidden costs of leaning on engagement metrics, the researchers said.
"Since visibility metrics, such as citations and media mentions, play a role in hiring and promotion decisions, recognizing that these metrics may be influenced by self-promotion disparities can encourage institutions to develop strategies to reduce the barriers contributing to these differences," said study co-author Misha Teplitskiy, U-M associate professor of information.
The research appears in the new issue of Nature Communications. Other co-authors include former U-M doctoral student Hao Peng, now at City University of Hong Kong, and Emőke-Ágnes Horvát of Northwestern University.
