Employment sectors as opportunity structures: The effects of location on male and female scientific dissemination

This project examines an understudied aspect of gender and scientific careers - the extent to which employment sectors act as opportunity structures for increasing or decreasing gender disparities in scientific dissemination. I capture productivity across sectors and work settings by focusing specifically on commercial science, using patenting activity as coinage for career productivity that spans academic and industrial contexts. Analyzing the structure of work settings across sectors provides new insight into the ways in which organizational context affects gender inequality in productivity.; Using data from the NSF Survey of Doctorate Recipients and a comprehensive sample of life scientists, I examine how the structure of work organization influences gender disparities in patenting behavior. I show how scientists' individual characteristics interact with the arrangement of their work environment to produce noticeably different gender disparities across sectors and work settings. In particular, women with children appear to be the principally commercially disadvantaged group in the university setting. However, there is no gender difference in involvement in certain industrial work settings---those characterized by flatter, more flexible organizational structures---than in hierarchically-arranged organizational settings such as academia and large, diversified industrial companies.; I propose that differences in the social arrangements and reward incentives of academia and industry contribute to differences in gender disparities across sectors. Using networks built from inventor collaborations in biotechnology patents from 1976-2002, I explore how the relational structure between industrial and academic scientists embodies these sector-level differences. The structure of scientific collaboration closely follows the social incentives of work in the academy and industry. Investigations of scientists' locations in these two settings suggest that women in the academy are located in more peripheral and less central collaborative relationships than men in the academy. Furthermore, academic women benefit less from central positions than their counterpart women in other locations.; The results suggest that commercialization may be a new arena for gender disparities in scientific productivity. However, a complex relationship between (1) organizational form, (2) the structure of sector-level rewards and incentives, and (3) collaborative relations is at work in bringing about differences in gender outcomes across sectors and work settings.