Promoting women in academia creates lasting benefits for future generations of female scholars

Promoting women in academia creates lasting benefits for future generations of female scholars

Research shows that early-career promotion decisions have long-term consequences for women’s academic careers and significantly strengthen the pipeline of future female academics.

Securing a permanent academic position early in one’s career is particularly important for women, according to new research by Manuel Bagues and Natalia Zinovyeva (Warwick Economics) with co-authors Giulia Vattuone (SOFI, Stockholm University) and Milan Makany of Erasmus School of Economics, Rotterdam.

The study, Female Promotions and the Academic Pipeline: Evidence from a Natural Experiment analyses data from 4,000 university departments across Spain and reveals that promotion decisions can shape not only individual careers but also the future composition of academia.

The researchers found that women who narrowly miss out on tenure face substantially greater long-term career consequences than men. Fifteen years later, women who failed to obtain tenure are 83 percentage points less likely to hold a tenured position compared with women who narrowly qualified. For men, the corresponding gap is only 38 percentage points. ‘Our findings suggest that the tenure stage is a critical bottleneck for women in academia,’ Makany said. ‘When talented women leave the academic pipeline at this point, the losses extend far beyond their individual careers.’

The study also uncovers strong evidence of a “trickle-down” effect when women do obtain permanent academic positions. Departments that promote a woman to Associate Professor gain, on average, 1.5 additional female faculty members within fifteen years and produce six additional female PhD graduates over the following decade. Moreover, female graduates of these departments are also more likely to remain in academia and advance to tenured positions themselves.

Setting in motion a chain of effects

Although the precise mechanisms remain an open question, the findings are consistent with several possible channels, including role-model effects, mentoring, and a more inclusive workplace climate. Importantly, the effects are concentrated in departments where women are present but not yet in the majority, suggesting that spillovers may build up gradually and require some pre-existing female presence rather than being triggered by the promotion of a first woman in an otherwise all-male department.

The findings provide new causal evidence supporting policies that reduce barriers to promotion for highly qualified women. These results underscore the value of ensuring that highly qualified women are not overlooked at key career stages, as their advancement can generate substantial and persistent benefits for universities and the broader research community.

About the Research

The research exploits a change in the Spanish academic qualification system that introduced quasi-random variation in candidates’ evaluation committees to explore the consequences of failing to obtain tenure. Women who failed to obtain tenure during the change were less likely than men to obtain it later in their careers, while departments that promoted a woman went on to promote more women and graduate more female PhDs than comparable departments

• Read a VoxEU column by the researchers hereLink opens in a new window.