Title: The impact of women in top academic positions: evidence from a randomized natural experiment. (joint with Manuel Bagues and Natalia Zinovyeva)

Abstract: We use unique evidence from Spanish academia to study whether the presence of women in top academic positions helps to attract more women into the profession, foster their professional careers, as well as affect the quality and type of research departments produce. We exploit the exogenous variation provided by the system of centralized qualification exams that was in place in Spanish academia between 2003 and 2007. All junior researchers seeking a promotion to Associate or Full Professor had to first qualify in an evaluation that was conducted at the national level. Crucially for our empirical strategy, the members of these evaluation committees were selected from the pool of eligible evaluators in the field using a random draw. As shown by Zinovyeva and Bagues (2015), the exogenous presence of a co-author, a colleague or an advisor in the committee increased candidates’ chances of success by around 40%. Preliminary findings at the individual level show that exogenous qualifications have a strong long-lasting impact on promotions. Our department-level analysis shows that departments with a “lucky” female candidate have a significantly larger number of women in the corresponding category during the following 13 years, compared to departments where female candidates were “unlucky”. Our results show that qualification exams provide an exogenous source of long-term variation in the gender composition of departments. We aim to exploit this variation to study how the presence of women in top academic positions affects a number of outcomes.