“Missing Women in Research” (with Yann Bramoullé, Roberta Ziparo)
We provide the first comprehensive analysis of gender gaps in academic trajectories post-graduation for an entire country, across all academic disciplines, and over more than 30 years. To do this, we combine data on the universe of PhD graduations in France between 1988 and 2021 with data on academic publications. We document the presence of persistent negative gender gaps. Strikingly, these gaps are, if anything, worse in disciplines where women are well represented among PhD graduates. Overall, women with a PhD are less likely than men to ever publish in Humanities and Law, STEM, and Social Sciences. Publishing women publish less publications than publishing men in all fields, and these publications have lower impact in Biological and Earth Sciences and Social Sciences. We detect positive gender gaps in two cases. Women are more likely than men to ever publish in Biological and Earth Sciences and publications of publishing women have a higher impact in STEM. While most disciplines outside of STEM have reached or exceeded gender parity among PhD graduates, our results suggest the existence of significant barriers affecting women in the transition from a PhD to an academic career. We estimate that removing these barriers would lead 15% of non-publishing female PhD graduates to become academically active, representing a significant number of missing women in research.
Presented at: PhD Seminar (AMSE, 2023; 2024); Junior Research Day (Collège de France, 2024); AFÉPOP (INED, 2024); JMA (Lille, 2024); PhD Seminar (CREST, 2024); LAGV (Marseille, 2024)
“Gender Disparities in French Academic Carreers: A Multi-Stage Analysis of Selection”
Presented at: PhD Seminar (AMSE, 2024); IOEA Spring School (Cargèse, 2024)