The research questions
The WIRED project analyzes gender inequalities in academic career progression with a specific focus on early-career phases, which remain under-explored in the literature.
More specifically, it explores the following questions:
- Is there a gender gap in the access to the position of assistant professorship?
- What are the reasons underneath and – more specifically – what the contribution of organizational factors – from the scientific field to the feminization of the organization up to the organizational performance – in explaining inequalities?
- Do women take a longer time to obtain tenured than men?
The field
Longitudinal administrative micro data of the Italian academic population have been accessed with the agreement and support of the Italian Ministry of University and Research (Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca: MUR). The register data include demographic and work-related information, including individual productivity based on the National Scientific Qualification (ASN), and they have been enriched with web-scrapped information on organizational performance. Such a rich dataset allows, for the first time, to measure the gender gap in recruitment among early-careers positions in Italy, that is the likelihood, for a post-doc, to become assistant professor. On the Swiss side, two academic organizations – the University of Lausanne and the University of Geneva – have provided the microdata regarding their academic work-force through time containing detailed demographic and work-related information. The two datasets are analyzed with advanced longitudinal methods. On a more descriptive level, WIRED can count on the data provided by the FSO (Federal Statistical Office) on the whole academic Swiss population which allows to understand the general trends of the workforce at the national level.
The results
With respect to the Italian field, the analyses on the 2010-2020 MUR dataset based on multi-level linear probability models suggest that women face a small adjusted penalty – of around 3–4% – in the transition from the post-doc to the assistant professor position. However, when disentangling the results by scientific field, strong differences emerge, with the gap reaching a maximum of − 10% in physics while being non-significant in many SSH. Within the STEMM, the life sciences, driven by medicine and biology, appear more gender unequal than many hard sciences. Moreover, a growing number of female full professors in the sub-field and working in a department with good financial resources represent two factors that have a moderate role in reducing the gap. All in all, this work sheds light on the importance of organizational and institutional factors in explaining the gender gap thus calling for structural interventions to make universities more inclusive towards women.