Where the Gender Gap Lives: Brazil’s Mid-Tier Psychology Programs Show the Widest Productivity Divide

A sweeping analysis of nearly 1,500 faculty members across 100 Brazilian psychology graduate programs has revealed a striking pattern in the long-running debate over gender and scientific productivity: the gap between men and women is real, but it is not evenly distributed. Instead, it concentrates sharply in the middle of the academic hierarchy, where programs hold intermediate ratings from the country’s federal evaluation agency, and it all but disappears at the very top of the system. The finding, published in Trends in Psychology, suggests that the forces shaping gender inequality in academia are not uniform but are instead intertwined with institutional context, career stage, and the uneven distribution of unpaid care work.

The research team, led by Natália Santos Marques and Francisco Pablo Huascar Aragão Pinheiro of the Federal University of Ceará, drew on an unusual national asset: the Lattes platform, a government-maintained curriculum database that virtually every Brazilian academic keeps updated because it is consulted in hiring, admissions, promotion, and grant competitions. Between January and February 2025, the researchers retrieved the curricula of permanent faculty affiliated with every psychology graduate program listed in the federal Graduate Studies Observatory. After removing duplicates and accounting for a handful of unreadable files, they assembled records for 1,482 unique faculty members, a sample closely matching official figures from the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel, known as CAPES.

Rather than simply counting publications, the team built a quality-weighted score for each researcher. Every journal article on a curriculum was assigned points according to the Qualis ranking system, CAPES’s bibliometric classification of journals within each field. In psychology, an article in an A1 journal, the highest tier reserved for outlets at or above the 87.5th percentile of citation performance, earned 100 points, while the scale descended through A2, A3, A4, and the B categories down to 12.5 points for a B4 journal, with unindexed and C-tier publications earning nothing. A researcher with ten A1 articles would therefore accumulate a score of 1,000. This approach meant the analysis captured not just how much faculty published but where they published, a distinction that matters enormously in a system where program funding and prestige hinge on the quality of intellectual output.

The statistical modeling was deliberately cautious. Because faculty are nested within programs, and because roughly 23 percent of the variance in article scores could be attributed to differences between programs, the team used multilevel models. Diagnostic checks revealed that the raw scores were strongly right-skewed and that relationships between productivity and career length were nonlinear, so the researchers turned to a generalized additive mixed model with a Gamma distribution and a log link, a framework well suited to strictly positive, skewed outcomes. Smoothing splines allowed the model to trace curved relationships: expected scores rise steeply during the first ten to fifteen years of a career, climb more slowly until around twenty to twenty-five years, and then plateau, with a slight downturn after thirty-five to forty years. Supervising doctoral students showed a strongly positive association with productivity up to roughly fifteen to twenty students, while the benefit of master’s supervisions flattened after about twenty-five to thirty.

The headline result confirmed the first hypothesis. Across the full sample, men’s estimated mean article score was 32 percent higher than women’s, a rate ratio of 1.32 with a 95 percent confidence interval of 1.15 to 1.51. Men had published more articles on average, 59.1 versus 46.4, and had accumulated higher quality-weighted scores, averaging 3,463 points compared with 2,833 for women. But the second hypothesis, that this male advantage would hold at every level of the program rating system, failed in an illuminating way. Using pairwise contrasts adjusted for career length and supervision counts, the team found statistically significant male advantages only in programs rated 3, 4, and 5, the lower and middle tiers of the CAPES scale. In programs rated 6 or 7, the elite category recognized for international excellence, and in newly authorized programs that had not yet been evaluated, the gender difference did not reach statistical significance.

The interaction between gender and program rating was itself significant, with the male-female gap in rating-3 programs substantially larger than in higher-rated programs. Among women faculty, estimated scores rose progressively and significantly with each step up the rating ladder, from rating 4 through rating 7, indicating that the most productive women in the sample were clustered in the most prestigious programs. Roughly 63 percent of the faculty were women, a proportion consistent with CAPES’s own report and with the broader demographics of Brazilian psychology, where women constitute about 90 percent of those trained in the discipline yet only 56.6 percent of faculty in higher education. Women are the majority in the profession, yet the productivity penalty they carry is concentrated in specific institutional niches.

Why would the gap vanish at the top? The researchers propose an exploratory explanation centered on career stage and the timing of motherhood. Because age was not directly recorded, they used years since PhD completion as a proxy and found a striking gradient: among women, the mean time since PhD rose monotonically with program rating, from 13.1 years in rating-3 programs to 21.3 and 21.5 years in rating-6 and rating-7 programs respectively. A bootstrap analysis with 5,000 resamples confirmed these differences were statistically significant, with a moderate effect size. In other words, women in elite programs tend to be further along in their careers, potentially beyond the life stages when reproductive labor, the caregiving and domestic work that falls disproportionately on women, most strongly constrains research output.

This interpretation is grounded in well-documented structural realities. Brazilian women spent an average of 9.6 more weekly hours than men on household chores and caregiving in 2022, according to the national statistics institute, and the disparity persisted even among employed individuals. National data also show that the presence of a young child dramatically widens the employment gap between women and men: among adults aged 25 to 54 with no child aged six or younger, 66.2 percent of women were formally employed compared with 82.8 percent of men, but when a young child was present the figures diverged to 56.6 percent and 89.0 percent. Previous Brazilian research has found that among the highest-tier CNPq productivity fellows, men with children published twice as many articles as women with children, while early-career fellows showed no such pregnancy-related penalty. The post-PhD window in which academic careers are consolidated overlaps closely with the decade in which women’s fertility declines most sharply, meaning researchers who choose motherhood often face reductions in publication output that men’s trajectories rarely mirror.

The authors are careful to frame this as a theoretically informed hypothesis rather than a definitive causal account. The study is cross-sectional, lacks direct measures of parenthood, parental leave, or caregiving time, and relies on a binary gender classification inferred from names and gender-marked terms in curricula, a procedure that cannot capture non-binary identities and may misclassify some transgender researchers. CAPES ratings themselves bundle together institutional conditions, including access to grants and collaboration opportunities, that may interact with care responsibilities in ways the current design cannot disentangle. The model’s adjusted R-squared of 0.47 indicates that gender, program rating, and their interaction explain a meaningful share of the variance, but more than half remains unexplained, consistent with the deeply multifactorial nature of academic productivity.

Even with those caveats, the implications are pointed. Gender inequality in Brazilian psychology’s research output is not a uniform ceiling pressing equally on all women; it is a concentrated burden falling on women in lower- and mid-tier programs, many of whom are navigating the career-building years in which decisions about motherhood and the intensive care of young children collide with the demands of establishing a publication record. The authors argue that targeted policies supporting women’s research during these pivotal years, rather than blanket interventions, may be the most effective way to narrow the gap. They also call for longitudinal studies tracking article scores over time, direct tests of the age and fertility hypothesis using administrative data, and qualitative research asking women in mid-rated programs how they perceive inequities and what factors they believe drive them. In a national system where program ratings determine survival, funding, and the right to grant doctoral degrees, understanding exactly where and why the gender gap thrives may prove as important as documenting that it exists at all.

Subject of Research: Gender disparities in research productivity among faculty in Brazilian psychology graduate programs

Article Title: Graduate Program Rating Moderates the Gender Productivity Gap in Brazilian Psychology: A Multilevel Analysis of Research Output

Article References: Marques, N. S., Sales, A. B. S., Ferreira, D. F., Oliveira, M. D. S. C., Teixeira, S. X., Barrozo, F. M. R., Dias, T. A., de Vasconcelos, W. G., & Pinheiro, F. P. H. A. (2026). Graduate Program Rating Moderates the Gender Productivity Gap in Brazilian Psychology: A Multilevel Analysis of Research Output. Trends in Psychology, 34(1), 394-414. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-025-00512-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-025-00512-5

Keywords: gender gap, research productivity, Brazilian psychology, graduate programs, CAPES, Qualis, Lattes platform, multilevel modeling, motherhood penalty, academic careers, scientometrics, higher education