Gendered careers: women economists in Italy

Recent reforms of the Italian university system introduced a centralized national qualification competition (called ASN), necessary for accessing all academic positions in the country. Following a well-known international trend, the new mechanism is founded on rigid standardized indexes of “scientific productivity” based on bibliometric indicators. In economics, women’s lower success rate (35%) compared to men’s (44%) is often connected to lower productivity. We provide evidence matching all candidates’ CVs with their record of publications on EconLit, showing that women’s typical career profiles, e.g. in terms of type of publications, topics and methods of inquiry, were penalized regardless of scientific productivity. Our work aims not only at documenting, through a large scale natural experiment, the causes of the underrepresentation of women in academia (especially in top positions) and within economics, but also at raising the issue of new incentives and constrains that increasingly push women to uniform their careers and their research interests to those of their men colleagues.