Done:
- Literature review on micro-meso-macro factors on gender inequalities in the general labour market and in the scientific/academic labour market more specifically
- Analysis of macro-data on gender, work and science on a comparative basis with a focus on Italy and Switzerland
- Data collection and creation of the dataset related to the Italian academic population from different sources
- Analysis of the Italian data set
- Data collection related the academic populations of the University of Lausanne and the University of Geneva.
Still ongoing:
- web-data mining and creation of the final two Swiss datasets.
- analysis of the Swiss datasets.
Overview of the results:
The results of the regression-based analyses conducted on the Italian datasets (including: random effects models, regression discontinuity models and accelerated time-failure models) show, for the first time with respect to the Italian context, that women experience an adjusted disadvantage in the transition from post-doc to assistant professor, including tenured assistant professor. The adjusted gap in promotion swing from 4 to 6%, according to whether we want to measure the transition to assistant professor in general, to non-tenured assistant professors (the so called “RTDa”) or to tenured assistant professors (the so-called “RTDb”). Moreover, women take longer to get promoted, which explain the fact that female post-docs, in average, are older than men. Looking at the determinants of this gap, the findings suggest that the disadvantage changes across scientific fields, being particularly hard in the medical sciences, followed by the social and political sciences, while the least gender unequal area is that of mathematics. All in all, the physical sciences and engineering (PE) looks the least unequal – probably because the high female self-selection – while the life sciences (LS) the most unequal but only because of the bad performance of medicine. Moreover, women must be more scientifically productive than men to have the same probability of promotion; the number of female full professors in the department positively affect women’s probability of transition but only to non-tenured positions. Finally, the disadvantage has worsened in time, thus confirming what my previous work suggested only a descriptive level (Gaiaschi, Musumeci, 2021), that is a deterioration of opportunities for women following the 2007-2017 cut in the turn-over and the precarization of the assistant professor position (L. 240/2010). These results suggest that when opportunities shrink for all, women pay the highest price.
List of future publications based on the WIRED project:
- One paper on the gender promotion gap and its determinants focusing on the transition from post-doc to assistant professor - currently working on it
- One paper on the gender difference in the length of promotion and so on the access to tenured positions (with Katy Morris) - currently working on it
- One paper on the gender effect of the L. 240/2010 law based on a regression discontinuity model (with Stephanie Steinmetz) - currently working on it
- One paper at least based on the UNIL database
- One paper at least based on the UNIGE database
