What we lose when women do not get tenure: Evidence from a natural experiment

Women remain underrepresented in the upper ranks of academia, but evidence on the mechanisms behind this has been scarce. This column exploits a change in the Spanish academic qualification system that centralised introduced quasi-random variation in candidates’ evaluation committees to explore the consequences of failing to obtain tenure. Women who failed to obtain tenure during the change were less likely than men to obtain it later in their careers, while departments that promoted a woman went on to promote more women and graduate more female PhDs than comparable departments. The findings suggest that the scarcity of senior women is partly self-perpetuating, and that promotion systems where failure is hard to undo and the decision falls during the prime years for family formation may particularly disadvantage women.