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Putting more women on academic hiring committees may actually hurt female applicants, study finds

Women don’t just throw wine in each other’s faces on reality TV shows – they can also (inadvertently) sabotage each other in the academy.

That’s the conclusion of a study of the “selection processes at Italian and Spanish universities in science subjects,” to be presented at the European Economic Association conference later this month, Inside Higher Ed reports.

The authors, professors at Finland’s Aalto University and Italy’s University of Pisa, reviewed “300,000 reports on 100,000 applications by 8,000 evaluators in 200 different disciplines” in Italy and Spain, “where anyone seeking promotion to associate or full professorial posts requires ‘a qualification granted by a centralized committee at the national level'”:

In Italy, “gender-mixed committees” showed “a small but significant bias” against women compared with all-male committees, with “an additional female evaluator decreas[ing] the relative chances of success for female candidates by approximately 2.6 percentage points,” the paper adds.

In Spain, the picture was more equivocal, with extra women on committees appearing to increase the rates of female candidates becoming full professors, but hindering them in promotions to associate professor.

The researchers found no evidence that committees revert to gender stereotypes when judging candidates from “very different research areas” or treat women with more scrutiny in “less feminized” fields. But they suspect that men basically feel less sorry for female candidates when the hiring committee includes women.

So yeah, gender quotas on these committees may not help women.

 

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About the Author
Associate Editor
Greg Piper served as associate editor of The College Fix from 2014 to 2021.