The Legibility Gap: How Gender Equity Interventions Redistribute Recognition Across Cultures

Abstract

Efforts to promote gender equity in science increasingly rely on name-based inference to quantify representation and guide policy and behavior. Yet linguistic cues that signal gender vary across cultures and are often obscured when names are transliterated into English. Here we identify a pattern we call the "legibility gap": when gender is inferred from names, equity interventions systematically benefit women whose names signal gender while bypassing those whose names lose such cues in translation. Using both observational and experimental evidence, we show how this gap reshapes recognition in science. Analyzing citation diversity statements-an emerging practice in which authors report the algorithmically estimated gender composition of their reference lists-we find that papers that include this practice cite women more frequently, but the gains accrue almost entirely to authors with gender-signaling Western names. By contrast, women whose names lose gender cues in English transliteration, predominantly those with East Asian names, receive fewer citations in these same papers. Two preregistered experiments (N = 2,250) corroborate this pattern and identify its mechanism: linguistic legibility, not cultural unfamiliarity, determines who is recognized as a woman and who benefits from policies designed to support women in science. Overall, these findings expose a previously unrecognized layer of inequity embedded in global equity infrastructures. As science becomes increasingly global and equity efforts increasingly algorithmic, the legibility gap reveals how uneven identity recognition reshapes fairness. In global systems of recognition, equity depends not only on whether policies are effective on average, but also on whether they are equitable across cultures.