The relationship between parenting engagement and academic performance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Gender differences in research productivity have been well documented. One frequent explanation of these differences is disproportionate child-related responsibilities for women. However, changing social dynamics around parenting has led to fathers taking an increasingly active role in parenting. This demands a more nuanced approach to understanding the relationship between parenting and productivity for both men and women. To gain insight into associations between parent roles, partner type, research productivity, and research impact, we conducted a global survey that targeted 1.5 million active scientists; we received viable responses from 10,445 parents (< 1% response rate), thus providing a basis for exploratory analyses that shed light on associations between parenting models and research outcomes, across men and women. Results suggest that the gendered effect observed in production may be related by differential engagement in parenting: men who serve in lead roles suffer similar penalties for parenting engagement, but women are more likely to serve in lead roles and to be more engaged across time and tasks, therefore suffering a higher penalty. Taking a period of parental leave is associated with higher levels of productivity; however, the productivity advantage dissipates after six months for the US-sample, and at 12-months for the non-US sample. These results suggest that parental engagement is a more powerful variable to explain gender differences in academic productivity than the mere existence of children, and that policies should factor these labor differentials into account.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".