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The gender productivity gap is a major contributor to gender inequality in science and technology careers. To explain the gap, researchers have documented its macro-level correlates such as male-female differences in employment, human capital, and social capital but have done less to show how the gap is produced by actions and relations that disadvantage women. Extending the extant research on mentoring, atypicality in creative work, and their relationship to productivity, this study suggests that the gender productivity gap may stem from early-career mentoring relations, particularly from the different trajectories that women’s and men’s work takes relative to their academic mentors. An analysis of careers in a subfield of electrical engineering showed that female researchers differentiated more from mentors than male researchers: a significantly larger share of their work was not co-authored with academic …