Does Gender Matter for Academic Promotion? Evidence from a Randomized Natural Experiment
Abstract
Several countries have recently introduced gender quotas in hiring and promotion committees at universities. This paper studies whether these policies increase the presence of women in top academic positions. The identification strategy exploits the random assignment mechanism in place between 2002 and 2006 in all academic disciplines in Spain to select the members of promotion committees. We find that a larger proportion of female evaluators increases the chances of success of female applicants to full professor positions. The magnitude of the effect is large: each additional woman on a committee composed of seven members increases the number of women promoted to full professor by 14%. Conversely, when committee members decide on promotions to associate professor positions, we do not observe any significant interaction between the gender of evaluators and the gender of candidates. If anything, in this case a larger share of female evaluators is associated with fewer successful female applicants. The evidence is consistent with the existence of ambivalent sexism.Download Info
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Paper provided by Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in its series IZA Discussion Papers with number 5537.Length: 45 pages
Date of creation: Feb 2011
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp5537
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Related research
Keywords: academic promotion; gender discrimination; randomized natural experiment;Other versions of this item:
- Natalia Zinovyeva & Manuel F. Bagues, 2010. "Does gender matter for academic promotion? Evidence from a randomized natural experiment," Working Papers 2010-15, FEDEA.
- J71 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor Discrimination - - - Hiring and Firing
- J45 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Particular Labor Markets - - - Public Sector Labor Markets
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
- NEP-ALL-2011-03-05 (All new papers)
- NEP-HME-2011-03-05 (Heterodox Microeconomics)
- NEP-LAB-2011-03-05 (Labour Economics)
- NEP-SOG-2011-03-05 (Sociology of Economics)
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Citations
Blog mentions
As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:- Does gender matter for academic promotion?
by Ariel Goldring in Free Market Mojo on 2010-06-06 09:56:40 - Cómo no seleccionar a los profesores en la universidad
by Samuel Bentolila in Nada Es Gratis on 2011-07-05 06:00:25
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