The researchers should have asked whether their metric, publication count, is all that great for assessing a professor's actual academic productivity: > "If th

The researchers should have asked whether their metric, publication count, is all that great for assessing a professor's actual academic productivity: > "If the productivity gap between men and women is entirely caused by gendered parenthood effects, then the productivity trends of men and women without children should be indistinguishable. To investigate this hypothesis, we examined each professor’s publication history and calculated their cumulative productivity over the 5 years before and 10 years after beginning their first assistant professor position." First, publication inflation is a common tactic in academia, in which a study that really could be published in one or two papers is broken up into two or three times as many in order to pad the professor's CV. Some academics have taken this practice to fairly ridiculous extremes, and that is going to skew the results. Second, there are multiple other plausible productivity metrics, such as the number of graduate students the professor has successfully mentored through a Master's or PhD program, the amount of grant dollars brought in, and the number and/or quality of courses taught at the undergraduate level (all adjusted to time spent as a professor). All these measures are also value judgments of some kind - the university administration may have its eyes on the grant dollars above all else, but in the larger societal context, well-trained young engineers, doctors, scientists etc. might be the more valuable academic product.