Abstract

Increasing the representation of women in academia is a priority challenge in higher education policy. This study uses data from the Italian University habilitation competition in 2012 to test whether this national, standardized and quantitative assessment of researchers contributed to improving the situation. The proportion of female applications (on the whole about 36%) was in many fields higher than the reported proportion of female University professors (27%, 2010), but lower than the proportion of female researchers (2010) in Italy (45% and 51% for researchers with and without a permanent position, respectively). There was still a gap between the proportion of female applications at the associate (on average 39%) and full professor level (29%). A similar gap was also present between scientific disciplines and the humanities. Average success rates of female applications (41.2%) were on the whole lower than those of male applications (43.9%), but in most fields these differences were not significant. Overall, it is generally much lower proportion of female applications rather than their lower success rate that perpetuates the low proportion of female academics in Italy. More effort is needed to support female researchers in choosing and pursuing an academic career.

Highlights

  • The underrepresentation of women in academia is a shameful legacy of decades of bias and unequal opportunities [1,2,3]

  • Recruitment processes have an important influence on the representation of women in academia [13], but they have been less studied than the proportion of female academics having already obtained a permanent position [14]

  • The progressive loss of female researchers from academia is a waste of resources and talent, which needs redressing [55,56,57,58,59,60]

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Summary

Introduction

The underrepresentation of women in academia is a shameful legacy of decades of bias and unequal opportunities [1,2,3]. Various reasons have been suggested to be responsible for the persistence of a low representation of senior women in academia, e.g., the precarious employment conditions of most early-career researchers, recent University funding cuts, the lack of female role models in senior academic positions, as well as gender bias in (1) editorial boards of journals, (2) invited speakers at conferences, and (3) committees evaluating grant applications, hiring decisions and promotions [7,8,9,10,11,12]. The 2012, University habilitation competition in Italy provides an opportunity to test whether the proportion of female candidates is increasing compared to data reported in the literature. This habilitation is a national competition that, if passed successfully, gives the right to apply to University associate and full professor positions, when these become available at individual Italian

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