Gender differences in the career progression of academic researchers: the importance of performance evaluations, self-selection and performance

Despite advances in gender parity during the past decades, women remain underrepresented in high status jobs and leading positions.

One challenge in understanding these gender gaps is lack of detailed data on the hiring process, making it difficult to separate discrimination from, e.g., gender differences in preferences or productivity.This research project builds on a new data set on hiring in academia – a sector known for its dearth of women at top positions.

The data set is unique in its scope and detail, covering all recruitment and promotion processes at the level of assistant, associate, and full professor (biträdande lektor, lektor and professor) at Sweden’s 10 largest universities from 2018 to 2020.

It covers, e.g., detailed information about all candidates and their applications, assessments provided by external referees (sakkunniga), and final hiring/promotion outcomes.These data allow us to make several novel contributions to the literature.

For example, they enable us to quantify gender gaps in hiring rates and analyze if, and to what extent, such gaps may be accounted for by (i) bias in candidate evaluations, or differences in (ii) application patterns or (iii) performance.

We also ask if male-majority environments discourage women from certain academic career paths and if men and women receive different credit for their coauthored work.

Taken together, these analyses provide novel insights about the mechanisms which may perpetuate gender gaps in labor markets, and in particular in high skilled professions.The research sector fills an important role in society.

If we fail to hire and promote the most productive researchers, resources will be sub-optimally allocated and research output negatively impacted.

Our results will address the question of how to improve gender equality and meritocracy in academia and should thus be of interest for universities, policy makers, funding agents and other research sector stakeholders.