Fig. 3: The relationship between gender and the gain from mentorship.
a F i denotes the set of protégés from our 3 million pairs that have exactly i female mentors. Focusing on male protégés, F i vs. F 0: i = 1, …, 5 refers to the change in the average post-mentorship impact of protégés in F i relative to the average post-mentorship impact of those in F 0 while controlling for the protégé’s big-shot experience, number of mentors, discipline, affiliation rank, and the year in which they published their first mentored paper. A t-test is used to show the that values are all satistically significant; see the corresponding p-values in Supplementary Table 24. b The same as a but for female protégés instead of male protégés. c The gain of a mentor when mentoring a particular protégé is measured as the average impact (〈c 5〉) of the papers they authored with that protégé during the mentorship period. While controlling for the protégé’s discipline, affiliation rank, number of mentors, and the year in which they published their first mentored paper, the figure depicts the change in the mentor’s average gain when mentoring a female protégé relative to that when mentoring a male protégé; results are presented for female mentors and male mentors separately. A t-test shows that the values are all statistically significant. Since scientific impact is sensitive to external values, we bootstrap a 95% confidence interval. The error bars represent the 95% confidence interval. *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.
