Who Decides Matters: Female Representation and Academic Career Advancement

This paper investigates the gender gap in academic promotions. The theoretical model proposed, in which men and women collectively negotiate their career upgrades but with different bargaining power, predicts that the likelihood of career progression for women depends negatively on the share of female scholars among the eligible candidates and positively on the available resources and women’s bargaining power. We relate the latter to metrics of women’s relative representation, such as the Glass-Ceiling Index, the Female Ratio, and the Share of Females in the boards in charge of deciding about those promotions. Leveraging a novel and suitably built dataset covering the universe of Italian Universities’ Departments, we find robust evidence supporting these predictions. In particular, the probability of women being upgraded to associate and full professors is strongly and positively associated with the shares of women in the pool of professors in charge of deciding about those promotions.