Across academia, men and women tend to publish at unequal rates. Existing explanations include the potentially unequal impact of parenthood on scholarship, but a lack of appropriate data has prevented its clear assessment. Here, we quantify the impact of parenthood on scholarship using an extensive survey of the timing of parenthood events, longitudinal publication data, and perceptions of research expectations among 3064 tenure-track faculty at 450 Ph.D.-granting computer science, history, and business departments across the United States and Canada, along with data on institution-specific parental leave policies. Parenthood explains most of the gender productivity gap by lowering the average short-term productivity of mothers, even as parents tend to be slightly more productive on average than nonparents. However, the size of productivity penalty for mothers appears to have shrunk over time. Women report that paid parental leave and adequate childcare are important factors in their recruitment and retention. These results have broad implications for efforts to improve the inclusiveness of scholarship.

在整个学术界，男性和女性往往以不同的速度发表文章。现有的解释包括父母身份对奖学金的潜在不平等影响，但缺乏适当的数据阻碍了其明确的评估。在这里，我们通过对 450 名授予计算机科学、历史和历史的 3064 名终身教职员工的育儿事件发生时间、纵向发表数据以及对研究期望的看法来量化育儿对学术的影响。美国和加拿大的业务部门，以及有关机构特定的育儿假政策的数据。父母身份通过降低母亲的平均短期生产力来解释大部分性别生产力差距，即使父母的平均生产力往往略高于非父母。然而，随着时间的推移，对母亲的生产力损失似乎有所缩小。妇女报告说，带薪育儿假和适当的儿童保育是她们被招募和留住的重要因素。这些结果对提高学术包容性的努力具有广泛的意义。