Archive Detail

Speaker:
Nevena Kulic

This event is part of an event series „Cluster Colloquium “The Politics of Inequality”“.

This article examines gender bias in the Italian academia, and whether this bias depends on one’s collaborative work and its related conventions across academic disciplines. We carry out the research by relying on status characteristics theory, which is tested via a factorial survey experiment of 2,098 associate and full-time professors employed in Italian public universities in 2019. This is one of the few experiments of the hiring process in academia conducted on a nationally representative population of university professors. Our article focuses specifically on three academic disciplines: humanities, economics, and social sciences. The results indicate that female academics in Italy are penalized for co-authoring. They receive less favorable evaluations of their competence, but only when the evaluator is a male. This gender bias is most pronounced in economics, a discipline where conventions of co-authorship allow for more uncertainty on individual contributions to a joint publication. Overall, the results partially confirm our postulates based on status characteristics theory.

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