Female Promotions and the Academic Pipeline: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

Manuel Bagues, Milan Makany, Giulia Vattuone and Natalia Zinovyeva ()
Additional contact information
Milan Makany: Erasmus University
Giulia Vattuone: SOFI, Stockholm University
Natalia Zinovyeva: University of Warwick

No 18477, IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER

Abstract: We study how faculty promotion decisions shape women's careers and the academic pipeline, using data from 4,000 Spanish university departments across all disciplines. We identify exogenous variation in promotions using the random assignment of evaluators to promotion committees between 2002 and 2008: applicants whose committees included a co-author or colleague were significantly more likely to qualify for promotion. We document two main findings. First, failing to obtain tenure has asymmetrically lasting consequences for women. Those who narrowly miss tenure are 57 percentage points less likely to be tenured fifteen years later, compared to 29 percentage points for men. Second, when women do obtain tenure, the effects extend well beyond their own careers: promoting a woman to Associate Professor increases female faculty by 1.5 members after 15 years, leads to six additional female PhD graduates over the following decade, and raises the number who subsequently remain in academia and reach tenured positions.

Keywords: academic promotions; women in academia; natural experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I23 J16 J44 M51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-edu, nep-gen, nep-lab, nep-lma and nep-sog
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp18477.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18477

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mark Fallak ().