Network Inequality and Fairness Group

We’re excited to share a new paper from Jan Bachmann, Lisette Espín-Noboa, Gerardo Iñiguez, and Fariba Karimi, published in Quantitative Science Studies! 🎉

The team studied brokerage in physics — when a scientist connects two colleagues who hadn’t collaborated before — and its effect on careers worldwide. They find that early-career participation in brokerage snowballs: it drives more brokerage later on, with the effect strongest among the most successful scientists, a classic cumulative-advantage pattern. Strikingly, this snowballing process affects women and men equally — but women remain more junior across all brokerage roles and lag in participation, largely a legacy of entering physics later and more slowly as a field. The findings suggest that giving early-career scientists more brokerage opportunities could help close that gap.

📖 Read the paper — Quantitative Science Studies, 7: 680–694 (2026)

Image by Aditya Sahu on Unsplash