Investigating writing style as a contributor to gender gaps in science and technology

In his classic essay, "The Normative Structure of Science," sociologist Robert K. Merton identified universalism as a foundational principle of the scientific enterprise, one that distinguishes science from other competing systems of knowing. According to Merton and Storer's formulation (Merton and Storer, 1973, p. 270), universalism holds that the evaluation of scientific contributions "is not to depend on the personal or social attributes of their protagonist; his race, nationality, religion, class, and personal qualities are as such irrelevant." The value of universalism is manifested perhaps most concretely in the practice of double-blind peer review, wherein the identities of both those making scientific claims and those evaluating them are obscured from one another (Bornmann, 2011). While scholars have long observed that adherence to the principle of universalism is far from universal (Mulkay, 1976; Cole, 1992; Long and Fox, 1995), the growing availability of large-scale databases is creating opportunities for unprecedented insight into processes of scientific evaluation (Teplitskiy et al., 2018; Dondio et al., 2019; Lane et al., 2021), including the barriers that inhibit objective assessments. Recent literature in particular has raised considerable concern about the role of gender in scientific evaluation (Moss-Racusin et al., 2012; Reuben et al., 2014; Oliveira et al., 2019; Card et al., 2020a).