Gender Quotas in Hiring Committees: a Boon or a Bane for Women?

Following in the footsteps of similar initiatives at the boardroom level in Norway and other European countries, the French government decided to impose a gender quota in academic hiring committees in 2015. The goal of this paper is to evaluate how this reform changed the way women are ranked by these committees. The reform affected academic disciplines heterogeneously. I contrast the effect of the reform between fields that were significantly affected, and those that already respected the quota before the reform. Drawing on a unique dataset made up of administrative data provided by French universities, I show that the reform significantly worsened both the probability of being hired and the ranks of women, with a treatment effect equivalent to a 4 standard deviation drop in h-index. There is evidence that this is driven mainly by the reaction of men to the reform, since the negative effect of the reform is concentrated in committees that are helmed by men.