Reduced Visibility: When Women as Mentors Become a Disadvantage
Victoria Sevcenko from the French business school INSEAD (left) and Dr. Leo Schmallenbach at the Best Paper Prize award ceremony in Berlin
This text was translated from German by AI / DeepL Pro.
Business administrators explain this difference by noting that supervisors, among other things, connect the people they supervise with their own academic community and thus “pass on” their professional network to them. Since the reach of female researchers is inherently smaller than that of male researchers, this also carries over to the mentees. The study was conducted by Prof. Dr. Karin Hoisl, holder of the Chair of Organization and Innovation; Prof. Dr. Marc Lerchenmüller, Assistant Professor of Technological Innovation and Management Science; and Dr. Leo Schmallenbach, habilitation candidate in Technology and Innovation Management.
“Neither the mentor’s performance nor that of the mentees plays a role here. Even when the quality of work is equivalent, mentees of men receive more visibility,” explains Hoisl. “Mentees of women, on the other hand, receive less attention—regardless of whether they themselves are women or men.”
Researchers refer to this mechanism as audience inheritance. The difference between men and women is even more pronounced when mentees work closely with their mentors and focus on similar research topics. Particularly significant: This difference persists even later in their careers, when mentees are already working independently—because the primary channel for disseminating research remains unchanged.
Recommendation: Provide targeted support to early-career researchers
In the study, the team analyzed more than 20,000 articles by approximately 2,700 early-career researchers. They found that publications co-authored with a female mentor received about eight percent fewer citations than those co-authored with a male mentor. “In papers that the mentees published on their own—that is, without their mentors as co-authors—this disadvantage persists, which has negative implications not only for career paths but also for the societal benefits of knowledge,” emphasizes Lerchenmüller.
Based on these findings, the researchers also derive recommendations for employers and managers: “Our results do not mean that women should no longer serve as mentors,” Schmallenbach stresses. “Rather, it is important to give early-career professionals access to additional, independent professional publications and to provide them with targeted support in building their own networks.”
Awarded the Best Paper Prize
The as-yet-unpublished study The Intergenerational Transmission of Gendered Visibility Gaps in Knowledge Work was awarded the Best Paper Prize in October 2026 by the Knowledge and Innovation Group of the Strategic Management Society. The award was presented to the Mannheim researchers at the Strategic Management Society’s annual conference in Berlin. The paper has been published as a “preprint” and is available at this link.