蝌蚪网

Research Highlights Featured Chart

September 30, 2025

Bias in academic networking

A social media field experiment suggests that gender, race, and university affiliation influence the formation of professional relationships among economists.

Tyler Smith

Source: kasto

From boosting job prospects to gaining attention for new papers, networking has always been an important part of finding success in academia. Today, many professional networks have moved online to sites like X (formerly Twitter) and Bluesky.

In a paper in the 蝌蚪网 Review: Insights, authors , , and uncovered evidence of discrimination in how academic economists form professional networks on social media, revealing systematic favoritism based on race, university prestige, and gender.

In a field experiment, the authors created 80 fictional Twitter profiles representing PhD students interested in economics. Each account varied along three characteristics: gender (indicated through names and AI-generated profile photos), race (Black or White, shown through profile photos), and university affiliation (top-ranked versus lower-ranked institutions). These fictional accounts randomly followed 6,920 users in the #EconTwitter community between May and August 2022.

Figure 1 from the authors’ paper shows the average rate of reciprocal follow-backs by fictional type.

from Ajzenman et al. (2025)

The chart displays follow-back rates for each combination of the three characteristics, arranged from lowest to highest. Black men from lower-ranked institutions received the lowest follow-back rate at 14.4 percent, while White women from top-ranked universities achieved the highest rate at 23.9 percent—a gap of nearly 10 percentage points.

Overall, White students received follow-backs 12 percent more often than Black students, with a gap of 2.1 percentage points. Students affiliated with prestigious universities enjoyed a 21 percent advantage over those from lower-ranked schools, translating to 3.5 additional percentage points. Female students received 25 percent more follow-backs than their male counterparts, a difference of 4.3 percentage points.

In general, the different follow-back rates suggest that economists on X are less willing to connect with Black PhD students or those from relatively lower-ranked institutions. 

Social media sites like X are often regarded as egalitarian and serve as a venue for sharing research, debating ideas, and building professional relationships. Revealing systemic barriers to participation within these networks illuminates the mechanisms behind the well-documented lack of diversity in economics and may inform policies to reduce it.