Institutional Discrimination: An Analysis of Women in Economics in Italian Universities

In this chapter, we focus on this last point in order to examine the working conditions of women economists in academia and whether and how they have been discriminated against in their career paths. In our analysis, we seek to define how institutional practices can systematically penalise minorities (Colander and Woos 1997; Zacchia 2021; May 2022), for example reproposing the doctrine of the separate spheres (Becchio 2024) in the academic work through a gendered division of labour between research—well evaluated in the academic career progression— and teaching and bureaucratic practices, that just like the unpaid care work is not considered as ‘productive’. We focus on Italy since, in the global context, the ‘Italian case’ from 2010 has been used several times as a field experiment to analyse gender differences in competitive environments, given the reform of the university system (Law 240, 2010) that changed the rules for entering the academic profession that imposed strict bibliometric criteria for the evaluation of researchers (Abramo and D’Angelo 2020; Corsi et al. 2019a, b; De Paola et al. 2018; Bagues et al. 2017; Baccini et al. 2019). Unlike the analyses conducted up to now, we focused on a qualitative analysis, providing a study of the Italian context regarding self-perceived gender differences in academia in the field of economics. We define how women in economics in Italian universities perceive their working environment once bibliometrics become a cornerstone for the recruitment and upgrading of researchers in universities. To do so, we analyse the data collected through a qualitative analysis on the condition of women in the academic profession in economics distributed among the members of the Italian Economic Society (SIE), looking at gender differences in family status, educational background, scientific production, care responsibilities, division of labour within the workplace and the self-perception of discrimination suffered.