Women now earn close to half of all PhDs awarded in many countries, yet remain a small minority at senior ranks in academia (Lundberg 2020). Two explanations have received particular attention in the literature on the causes of female underrepresentation in top academic positions. 

The first concerns the structure of the academic career, which combines the features of what Claudia Goldin terms ‘greedy jobs’ – long hours and sustained effort over many years – with substantial uncertainty about whether that investment will ultimately pay off. Because these demands peak when family decisions cannot easily be postponed, the opportunity cost of an academic career is larger for women, who face a narrower biological window for childbearing and a larger share of caregiving responsibilities (Bütikoferet al. 2018). 

The second explanation is that the scarcity of women at the top may be self-perpetuating: with few women in senior positions, younger women encounter fewer role models, less mentoring, and a less inclusive workplace climate, making academic careers less attractive and harder to sustain.

In a new paper (Bagues et al. 2026), we exploit a natural experiment generated by the Spanish academic qualification system, between 2002 and 2008. Until 2002, Spanish universities had considerable autonomy over tenure decisions. The habilitación system changed this by requiring candidates to obtain a national qualification before being appointed as associate or full professor. Evaluation committees were formed by lottery within each academic field, generating quasi-random variation in who evaluated whom. 

Around 30,000 Spanish academics attempted to qualify as associate or full professor, and given the limited number of slots available, only about 10% succeeded. Zinovyeva and Bagues (2015) showed that the process was far from a meritocratic ideal: among candidates with the same number of potential connections, those who were lucky enough to have one randomly assigned to their committee (around one-third of all candidates) were about 5 percentage points more likely to succeed (see Zinovyeva and Bagues 2012 for an earlier discussion of the role of connections in these evaluations). 

We exploit this exogenous variation in the chances of being promoted to study two questions. First, what are the long-term consequences for candidates who narrowly fail to obtain tenure? Second, when a department appoints a woman to tenure, what happens to the careers of other women in that department?

The individual cost of failing tenure

A simple comparison between successful and unsuccessful candidates would conflate the effect of obtaining tenure with selection. The committee lottery allows us to get around this: we compare similar candidates who happened to draw a connected committee member with those who did not. The results are striking. Among candidates who failed to qualify through bad luck in the committee draw, around 60% had still not obtained a tenured position after 10 years, and 50% had still not done so after 15 years.

The cost is much larger for women. The top row of Figure 1 plots, by year following the qualification decision, how much associate-professor candidates who were initially unsuccessful are less likely to hold a tenured position than their initially successful counterparts. The gap shrinks over time as some unsuccessful candidates catch up, but only slowly – and especially slowly for women. Fifteen years after a failed qualification, 57% of female candidates were still without tenure, compared with 29% of men. Our analysis points to at least two channels: women who fail are less likely to reapply and less likely to remain research-active.

Figure 1 The individual cost of failing qualification, by rank and gender

Notes: Estimated gap in promotion attainment between initially successful and initially unsuccessful candidates, by year following the qualification decision. Top row: candidates for associate professor; bottom row: candidates for full professor. Left column: women; right column: men. Estimates exploit quasi-random variation in committee composition; see Bagues et al. (2026) for details.

This asymmetry, however, may say less about women than about timing. At the full professor level – an evaluation similar to that for associate professors but one that arrives later in a career, and where unsuccessful candidates retain their existing tenured positions – we find little persistence and no gender gap (Figure 1, bottom row). Failed candidates of both genders catch up quickly. 

What we are seeing, then, is not that women are less persistent than men, but that the tenure decision arrives at an especially unforgiving moment: when family demands bind tightly, and when failure means falling out of the academic safety net altogether.

The departmental spillovers of promoting women

We next ask whether successful promotions have effects that extend beyond the candidate herself. Our estimates show that when a department appoints a woman to a tenured position, 15 years later it has appointed 1.5 more female associate professors than comparable departments that did not gain a tenured woman due to back luck in the committee draw (Figure 2, Panel A). The effect also propagates to PhD students: it produces six additional female PhD graduates over the following decade (Panel B), four of whom remain research-active in academia (Panel C), and one is promoted to associate professor within ten years of graduation (Panel D). By contrast, we find no significant effects on male PhDs or male promotions, suggesting the spillover is gender-specific.

Figure 2 The departmental spillovers of promoting a woman

Notes: Estimated effect of a female qualification to associate professor on cumulative departmental outcomes, by year following the qualification exam. A) Number of women hired or promoted to associate professor; B) Number of female PhD graduates; C) Number of female PhD graduates remaining research-active (publishing at least one paper within five years of graduation); D) Number of female PhD graduates promoted to tenure within ten years of graduation. Estimates exploit quasi-random variation in committee composition; see Bagues et al. (2026) for details.

A gender-neutral alternative?

Policies that explicitly favour women are not always legally or politically feasible. We therefore explore an alternative, using the same empirical strategy to examine the effect of promoting candidates, regardless of their gender, in more female-dominated research fields. In economics, for instance, this corresponds to promoting candidates in fields such as economics of education or health economics – which tend to attract more women – over fields such as microeconomic theory or macroeconomics, where female representation is much lower. 

We find that this approach can be an effective complement at the faculty level: departments that exogenously promote a candidate from a female-intensive field also go on to promote more women. For PhD outcomes, however, the effect is smaller than for direct female promotions, suggesting that gender-specific mechanisms play an additional and substantial role. Together, the two approaches point to a layered policy toolkit: direct female promotion remains most effective, but promoting candidates from female-intensive fields offers a feasible complementary lever.

Takeaways

First, our findings serve as a reminder that academic careers, which should in principle be purely meritocratic, are subject to a considerable degree of luck. In our setting, drawing a favourable evaluation committee changed the lives of hundreds of candidates. Beyond this particular example, the chance of finding a good supervisor, a generous co-author, a promising research project, a well-timed grant, or a benevolent editor has surely shaped the trajectories of many of us.

Second, the design of the promotion system itself matters for gender equity. A system that requires academics to spend years – often into their forties – in a state of professional limbo before securing a permanent position imposes a high cost on everyone, and an especially steep one on women.

Third, interventions that bring women into senior positions – or that promote candidates from female-intensive research fields – have important spillover effects. A single appointment generates more female promotions and more female PhDs over the following decade and a half – and many of those PhDs go on to research careers of their own.

Finally, our data cannot fully answer why promoting a woman benefits other women in the department. Previous research points to several possible mechanisms such as role model effects and mentoring (e.g. Carrell et al. 2010, Porter and Serra 2020, Ginther et al. 2020), as well as improvements in workplace climate and inclusion (Folke and Rickne 2022). Identifying which mechanisms matter most remains an open question – and one whose answer could meaningfully improve the design of policies aimed at retaining women in academia.

References

Bagues, M, M Makany, G Vattuone, and N Zinovyeva (2026), “Female promotions and the academic pipeline: Evidence from a natural experiment”, CEPR Discussion Paper 21325.

Carrell, S E, M E Page, and J E West (2010), “Sex and science: How professor gender perpetuates the gender gap”, Quarterly Journal of Economics 125(3): 1101–44.

Folke, O, and J Rickne (2022), “Sexual harassment and gender inequality in the labor market”, Quarterly Journal of Economics 137(4): 2163–212.

Bütikofer, A, S Jensen and K G Salvanes (2018), “The role of parenthood on the gender gap among top earners”, VoxEU.org, 29 November.

Lundberg, S, and J Stearns (2020), “Women in the economics profession: A new eBook”, VoxEU.org, 5 March.

Porter, C, and D Serra (2020), “Gender differences in the choice of major: The importance of female role models”, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 12(3): 226–54.

Zinovyeva, N, and M Bagues (2012), “It’s not what you know, but who you know: The role of connections in academic promotions”, VoxEU.org, 16 September.

Zinovyeva, N, and M Bagues (2015), “The role of connections in academic promotions”, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 7(2): 264–92.