PONE-D-21-24678The Gender Gap in Ph.D. Entrepreneurship: How do students perceive the academic environment?PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Muscio,

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Isabel Novo-Cortí

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments:

This paper analyses the gender differences in the university environment at the doctoral level, with data relating to Italy. Although the topic is interesting, especially in its application to entrepreneurship, both reviewers indicate the need to deepen the description of the sample and complete the analyses carried out and provide more exhaustive explanations and interpretations. For this reason, a thorough review of the work is required.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Partly

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: This paper is interesting and well written. The topic is very well focused, and the possible applications of the conclusions could be valuable. The statistic analysis is also interesting, but I would like to use a deeper analysis with a complementary method, for example, an ANOVA comparing results. If possible, I recommend completing the paper. Besides, the complements of qualitative information will substantially improve if more explicative information is provided.

Reviewer #2: Novo-Cortí & Muscio (2021) examine gender gaps in Ph.D. entrepreneurship through a 2014-15 survey of Italian doctoral students. They make comparisons between male and female students’ perceptions about successful entrepreneurship and draw connections to the support offered by their universities. Although their survey provides important data on doctoral students’ perceptions of entrepreneurship, more detail is necessary in the paper and the analyses performed to reach their conclusion that gender differences in doctoral students’ perceived university support of entrepreneurship leads to the gender gap in doctoral entrepreneurship.

First off, I commend the authors for pursuing this survey for a large, representative sample of Italian doctoral students. There is limited data on doctoral students and their preferences for entrepreneurship, so this survey will likely be of use for many topics of interest. As such, I expected more detail about the survey in this paper. In their submission, the authors reference another one of their papers that discussed the survey and provided a data sample; this information would have also been helpful in this paper for readers to get a full picture of what the survey entailed. The authors also provided an original copy of the survey in Italian with their supporting materials; I would encourage submitting an English translation of the survey as well. This would better allow English-speaking readers to follow specific survey questions as they are referenced in the paper.

Giving the readers more information about the survey will allow them to better follow the paper’s analyses, which could be performed more rigorously and with more detail. As the analyses currently stand, the results provided are lacking information to reach the conclusions drawn in the paper. The strongest evidence provided are the t-tests for gender differences in perceptions of successful entrepreneurship, obstacles, and their parent university’s entrepreneurship environment (Tables 1-3). However, for these tables, the authors did not provide a p-value and rather used asterisks to denote the range of potential p-values. Providing the actual p-value or a standard error for these t-tests could better help readers determine the significance of these results.

The authors then draw comparisons between the gender gap in entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial intention with students’ university environment. They again use a battery of t-tests; because they are drawing comparing across gender and across university characteristics, the t-tests are difficult to interpret as correlations between the two. It would be more appropriate to use a regression that interacts characteristics of the university environment with gender. The authors also describe analyses that provide different cuts of the data, such as focusing on only students with high entrepreneurial intention. However, their paper does not provide results with those separate cuts of the data; for example, Table 4 (the final table) appears to perform analyses for the entire dataset. This makes it difficult for readers to determine whether the authors’ conclusions are adequately supported by the data.

Overall, Novo-Cortí & Muscio (2021) has the potential to be informative of the gender gap in doctoral entrepreneurship. In its current state, the paper requires more detail and additional analyses to solidify the conclusions about how university support differentially affects male and female students’ entrepreneurial tendencies. Thus, I recommend a major revision and resubmission.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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The Gender Gap in Ph.D. Entrepreneurship: How do students perceive the academic environment?

PONE-D-21-24678R1

Dear Dr. Muscio,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

Kind regards,

Isabel Novo-Cortí

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #2: Yes

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6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #2: All of my comments from the previous submission have been addressed. I believe the edits strengthen the paper's conclusions and can thus be accepted for publication.

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #2: No