Download

Abstract

We study how promotion decisions shape women’s careers and the gender composition of academia, exploiting a natural experiment in Spain. Between 2002 and 2008, promotion to tenured positions required passing a national evaluation assessed by randomly drawn committees. Applicants who drew an evaluator with whom they had an academic connection were more likely to pass, generating quasi-random variation in promotions. Using data on about 31,000 applications across 4,000 departments, we document two main findings. First, missing out on tenure has far more persistent consequences for women: failing because of an unfavorable committee draw reduces the probability of holding tenure ten years later by 82 percentage points for women, compared with 39 for men. Second, promoting a woman leads to a lasting increase in women’s presence in her department, among both faculty and PhD graduates. Promoting researchers in female-intensive subfields has similar effects, suggesting that these spillovers operate partly through research orientation.

Non technical summaries