Women in Top Academic Positions: Is There a Trickle-down Effect?"

We study how the promotion of female faculty affects future hiring and PhD cohorts, using data from around 4,000 Spanish university departments across all disciplines. We identify exogenous variation in promotions by exploiting the random assignment of evaluators to promotion committees from 2002 to 2008, where applicants with close connections among their evaluators have significantly better success rates. Exogenously promoting a woman to Associate Professor increases female faculty by 1.5 members after 15 years and leads to six additional female PhD graduates at the department. It also improves academic retention and success of junior female researchers. Promoting researchers, of any gender, in female-dominated fields generates similar but smaller effects, suggesting that while research alignment matters, gender itself plays an independent role. These results suggest that advancing women at key career stages can generate lasting, cumulative gains throughout the academic pipeline.

Joint with Manuel Bagues, Giulia Vattuone, Natalia Zinovyeva