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Breaking the glass door in academia? Looking at the role of scientific fields and contextual factors in moderating the gender gap in recruitment: evidence from Italy Open PDF
(Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2025-07-15)
Gaiaschi, Camilla
Women's presence in academia has sharply increased in recent years, but gender inequalities in career progression persist. Italy makes no exception to this trend as different studies on the promotion gap to associate and to full professors have suggested. However, no measure of the adjusted gender differential in the previous steps of the career, that is in the transition from the post-doc to the assistant professor position, has been provided so far. This paper aims to fulfill this gap by means of an original, longitudinal, and multi-source dataset on the Italian academic population which has allowed to measure the female disadvantage in recruitment by controlling for a large set of confounding characteristics including individual productivity and, most especially, contextual factors, which have been under-explored so far. Results suggest that women face a small adjusted penalty, of around 3-4%, in academic recruitment. However, when disentangling the analyses 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.
Breaking through the glass ceiling. Simulating policies to close the gender gap in the Italian academia Open PDF
(2023)
Filandri, M.
;
Pasqua, S.
;
Priori, E.
As gender discrimination in academia is still far from being resolved, the recent debate focuses on the policies that can be adopted to increase gender balance in university systems. We construct a virtual academia—scaling down Italian academia in 2019—and simulate the evolution of its gender composition using an agent-based model that considers the complex nature of gender discrimination. Our findings show that, despite the rhetoric of meritocracy, a one-hundred-year period would not be enough to close the gender gap, even assuming that female researchers have the same scientific productivity as their male colleagues. To achieve more gender equality, universities should implement a set of policies that includes maternity bonuses in the evaluation of the CVs of female candidates for promotion, rules for a more gender balanced composition of the committees evaluating candidates for promotion, and gender quotas in promotions to full professorships. The gender gap in the Italian academia will close only when all these policies are introduced simultaneously. © 2023 Elsevier Ltd

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