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

The research, conducted by Noa Achouche of Université Paris Nanterre and the University of Haifa together with Haya Stier of Tel Aviv University, focuses on second-generation immigrant women, the native-born daughters of immigrants who occupy what the authors describe as an in-between position in French society. Although they share the same schools, institutions, and legal environment as women of native parentage, they are socialized within families whose cultural backgrounds, gender norms, and economic resources often differ from those of the majority population. The study asks whether this inherited background changes how much motherhood costs in the labor market, and the answer, in short, is that it does, though not always in the ways standard assimilation theory would predict.

To answer the question, the researchers drew on six waves of the French labor force survey, the Enquête Emploi en Continu, covering 2015 to 2020. After pooling the data, they assembled a sample of 57,319 women of native origin and 12,961 native-born daughters of immigrants, all aged between 25 and 45, the years when childrearing and career building overlap most intensively. The age restriction also addresses a technical limitation of labor force surveys, which identify mothers only through children living in the household and would otherwise misclassify older women whose children have left home. Origin was defined by parental country of birth and grouped into categories: women with two native-born parents, two parents born elsewhere in Europe, two parents born outside Europe, one non-European-born parent, and a residual group of other configurations.

The analytical strategy combined logistic regressions predicting employment with linear regressions predicting the logarithm of monthly wages, estimated in successive steps that first established raw associations and then added sociodemographic controls. A central methodological concern was selection: women who become mothers differ systematically from those who do not, and women who remain employed after childbirth are a selective subgroup in every origin category. To address this, the authors applied inverse probability weighting, balancing mothers and childless women on observed characteristics such as age, education, partnership status, and residential area, and applying combined weights in the wage models to account for selection into both motherhood and employment. Marginal predictions were computed for a representative 35-year-old woman with a graduate degree, a co-resident partner, and a standard 35-hour working week, allowing direct comparison of predicted outcomes across origin groups and family sizes.

The descriptive portrait already revealed deep divides. Women with two non-European-origin parents, primarily descendants of immigrants from North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Turkey, had an employment rate of 59.7 percent, compared with 77.8 percent among native-origin women and 80.8 percent among those with two European-origin parents. They also reported the highest average number of children, 2.21 against 1.92 for native-origin women. Interestingly, women with one non-European-origin parent reported the highest rate of graduate education, 20.1 percent, exceeding even native-origin women at 13.7 percent, a pattern the authors link to the strong emphasis that mixed families often place on education as a route to upward mobility.

The employment findings showed a graded structure. Each additional child was associated with a 6.9 percentage point reduction in the probability of employment in unadjusted models, attenuating to 5.5 points after controls. Predicted probabilities from the selection-adjusted model made the origin contrasts vivid: among native-origin women, the predicted employment probability fell from 0.94 for childless women to 0.88 for mothers of two or more children, a gap of roughly six points. Women of European origin displayed an almost flat pattern, declining only from 0.90 to 0.89, while women with two non-European-origin parents showed the largest drop, from 0.92 to 0.83, a difference of about nine percentage points. Women with one non-European parent fell in between, closely mirroring the native-origin gap. Multinomial regressions added a crucial nuance: the lower employment of women of non-European origin was driven mainly by labor force withdrawal rather than unsuccessful job search, a pattern consistent with caregiving norms rather than simple unemployment.

Yet the strongest and most surprising results concerned wages. Among employed women of native origin, each additional child was associated with roughly 0.6 percent lower monthly wages after full adjustment. For women with two non-European-origin parents, the child-related wage loss was dramatically larger: each child carried an additional 2.9 percent wage disadvantage beyond the baseline, implying a combined penalty of about 3.5 percent per child, a difference that remained statistically significant even after accounting for selection into motherhood and employment. By contrast, women with one non-European-origin parent displayed the opposite pattern, with each additional child associated with wages about 2 percent higher than the reference group. The authors interpret this unexpected premium as a form of advantageous selection: the employed mothers of mixed origin who remain in the labor market are an exceptionally well-positioned group, benefiting from the dual socialization and stronger navigation of host-country institutions that mixed families often provide.

The theoretical implications cut across two influential literatures. Classical assimilation theory predicts that sustained exposure to host-country institutions should erode origin-based inequalities across generations, and indeed women of European origin, whose employment and wage patterns closely resembled those of native-origin women, fit this expectation. But the persistent disadvantages among women with two non-European-origin parents align better with segmented assimilation frameworks, in which structural barriers, discrimination, and minority-status dynamics channel different groups onto divergent paths. The authors also draw on intersectional theory, arguing that gender, family status, and parental origin are overlapping axes of position whose combined effects produce hierarchies among women that aggregate gender-gap statistics conceal. Employer perceptions may play a role here too: second-generation mothers of non-European descent may still be read through the lens of their parents’ origin and stereotyped as more committed to family than to work, compounding the biases that all mothers face.

The study’s limitations are acknowledged candidly. Because the labor force survey is cross-sectional, women cannot be observed before and after childbirth, so the estimates capture associations rather than causal effects and may partly reflect pre-existing differences between women who become mothers and those who do not. The broad European and non-European categories also obscure heterogeneity within groups, and the data contain no information on religion, which may partly confound the cultural mechanisms at work. No longitudinal French data source currently combines detailed employment histories with information on immigrant origin and generation, however, making this design the only feasible option. The authors frame their goal as descriptive: documenting how motherhood-related inequality is distributed across origin groups rather than isolating the causal effect of childbearing itself.

The broader message is stark. In a republic whose universalist ideals officially render origins irrelevant, the price of motherhood is still being paid on unequal terms, generation after generation. Employment and earnings penalties associated with having children are not simply gender inequalities but are shaped by family migration histories, particularly through caregiving responsibilities. As debates over immigration, integration, and equality continue to dominate French public life, the findings suggest that policies aimed at closing gender gaps, from childcare provision to anti-discrimination enforcement, will fall short unless they attend to the differentiated positions of women within the second generation. Motherhood, the study concludes, is not merely a moment of individual transition but a mechanism through which intergenerational inequality is quietly reproduced.

Subject of Research: Motherhood-related labor market disadvantages among second-generation immigrant women in France, examined by parental origin.

Article Title: The Price of Motherhood Among Second-Generation Immigrants in France

Article References: Achouche, N., & Stier, H. (2026). The Price of Motherhood Among Second-Generation Immigrants in France. Social Indicators Research, 184(3), Article 47. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-026-03938-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11205-026-03938-1

Keywords: motherhood penalty, second-generation immigrants, France, parental origin, wages, employment, labour market inequality, gender inequality, immigrant integration, mixed-origin families, Social Indicators Research, Price