Co-authorship and gender bias in early stage academic hiring

This article studies the hiring intentions of tenured professors with regard to early career researchers. In particular, it examines gender bias in evaluations of academic hiring in Italy and investigates whether this bias depends on collaborative work and its related conventions across academic fields. We rely on status characteristics theory to test our hypotheses via a factorial survey (vignette) experiment of 2,098 associate and full 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 fields: 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 qualifications, but only when the evaluator is a man. As hypothesized, this gender bias is found in economics, a field where conventions of co-authorship allow for more uncertainty about individual contributions to a joint publication. Our results show that the evaluation of academic output of Italian female academics is subject to some ‘hidden’ gender bias. When individual academic output becomes ambigious, as is the case in collaborative work, gender as a status characteristic becomes activated. We find that, during the early career stage, women in Italy are indeed penalized for having all co-authored publications. Compared to their male colleagues, they receive less favorable evaluations of being considered qualified for a tenure track or non-tenure track assistant professorship, but only when the evaluator (an associate or full professor) is a man. This gender bias seems to be present in economics, a discipline which is argued to rely predominantly on conventions of co-authorships that allow for more uncertainty on individual contributions to a joint publication. Our findings complement recent observational evidence which focuses primarily on the field of economics in the US (Sarsons et al. 2021). By focusing on various academic disciplines that operate according to different co-authorship conventions, and in a different context, our experimental study contributes to a broader question of the ‘boundaries’ of gender bias. The larger implication of these findings is that, when it comes to collaborative work, which is ever increasing in academia, women’s contribution is underestimated, confirming some of the postulates of the status characteristic theory. It is, however, important to emphasize that, contrary to the empirical evidence that finds that both sexes are likely to show bias against women when hiring in academia (Moss-Racusin et al., 2012; Bagues et al., 2017), our study underlines the presence of male bias in the Italian academic context. This result calls for raising awareness to counter such biases and to reinforce equal representation of men and women in academic organizations. A more explicit action in this direction would be to impose a quota on the gender composition of the appointing committees and thus fix the gender composition within ranks.