Does the Gender Composition of Scientific Committees Matter?
By Manuel F. Bagüés, M. Sylos-Labini, N. Zinovyeva. Social Science Research Network, 2017
240 citations recorded by the source corpus.
An increasing number of countries are introducing gender quotas in scientific committees. We analyze how a larger presence of female evaluators affects committee decision-making using information on 100,000 applications to associate and full professorships in all academic disciplines in two countries, Italy and Spain. These applications were assessed by 8,000 evaluators who were selected through a random draw. A larger number of women in evaluation committees does not increase either the quantity or the quality of female candidates who qualify. If anything, when evaluators' are not familiar with candidates' research area, gender-mixed committees tend to be less favorable towards female candidates than all-male committees, with the exception of evaluations to full professorships in Spain. Data from 300,000 individual voting reports suggests that men become less favorable towards female candidates as soon as a woman joins the committee.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Safety Research
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7dc881bc319d4281d595a1466d112c868b66602c
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Citations in the corpus
- Gender and international diversity improves equity in peer review (2018, result): “56 However, an inverse relationship was found by [45] in the evaluation of candidates for 57 professorships: when female evaluators were present, male evaluators became less favorable 58 toward female candidates.”
- Gender Bias in Teaching Evaluations (2017, unknown): “Although Bagues et al. (2017) find that the gender composition of committees does not affect hiring decisions, Bagues and Esteve-Volart (2010) present evidence that candidates become less likely to be hired if the committee contains a higher share of evaluators with the same gender as the candidate.”