Double standards? : co-authorship and gender bias in early stage academic evaluations

Abstract

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.