  Mounting evidence suggests that publications and citations of scholars in the
STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) suffer from
gender biases. In this paper, we study the physics community, a core STEM field
in which women are still largely underrepresented and where these gender
disparities persist. To reveal such inequalities, we compare the citations
received by papers led by men and women that cover the same topics in a
comparable way. To do that, we devise a robust statistical measure of
similarity between publications that enables us to detect pairs of similar
papers. Our findings indicate that although papers written by women tend to
have lower visibility in the citation network, pairs of similar papers written
by men and women receive comparable attention when corrected for the time of
publication. These analyses suggest that gender disparity is closely related to
the first-mover and cumulative advantage that men have in physics, and is not
an intentional act of discrimination towards women.
