Pourquoi les femmes occupent-elles moins de postes à responsabilité ?

Gender gaps in employment and wages have decreased over the past decades, especially once we control for observable characteristics. However, women are still underrepresented in high paid jobs, and this is largely the result of lower promotion rates. Our study on French academic economists, whose promotion to senior positions occurs through a national contest, finds that women are not subject to discrimination during the promotion contests. Instead, female academics are between 30 and 40% less likely than men to enter these contests. We also find that this application gap is not due to a higher cost of promotion for women nor to women having a different trade-off between wages and department prestige than men, which leaves the expectation of discrimination and a dislike for entering competitions as the sole possible explanations. Long-term public policy can aim at encouraging self-confidence in girls so as to eventually make women as competitive as men. In the short term, making the application gap public knowledge so as to change women's expectations of discrimination or making candidatures automatic, substituting the opting-in by an opting-out system, could reduce the gender gap in promotions.