Does a gender disparity exist in academic rank? Evidence from an Australian university

Abstract

Employing a unique administrative data set on academics from the University of Wollongong (UOW), we investigate if women are under-represented in academic rank, taking into account information on personal characteristics, job characteristics, education and productivity. The results suggest that males have a significant advantage in rank attainment. The possession of a PhD, the number of years of experience and the number of journal articles, books, book chapters, competitive grants and ERA A* ranked articles appear to be important for academic rank attainment. A Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition test indicates that both supply side and demand side factors play a role; however, there is greater support for the endowments argument. Interviews were conducted in an attempt to explain the results. Interviews showed that men were more career-driven compared to women.

Keywords:

• gender
• Australia
• academia
• administrative data

JEL Classification:

• J16
• J40

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank two anonymous referees for valuable comments. We also wish to thank Craig Napier and Matthew Perry for providing us with data, Mei Ball for research assistance and Mary Barrett, Anne Collett, Sarah Dolncair, Ben Jann, Amnon Levy, Wenche Ommundsen and seminar participants at the School of Economics University of Wollongong for insightful suggestions.

Funding

This project was funded by a University of Wollongong Faculty of Commerce Research Grant.

Notes

¹ There is a literature that examines the gender salary gap. Our study, however, focuses on the gender gap in academic rank.

² Mumford (2000) finds that of the sample of countries investigated, Australia has the largest relative proportion of females at lower ranks levels.

³ The Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) initiative assesses research quality within Australia’s higher education institutions using a combination of indicators (Australia Research Council, 2011; http://www.arc.gov.au/era/). Since the total number of publications (including journal articles, books, book chapters and conference papers) and receipt of funding is misleading for publications/funding, where there are more than one author, we weigh the number of publications/receipt of funding by the number of co-authors in the empirical estimation so that it accurately reflects productivity.

⁴ The Blinder–Oaxaca method is used, for example, by Broder (1993) to investigate gender differences in remuneration and professional achievement among academic economists and by Warman et al. (2010) to investigate male and female earnings differences in Canadian universities.

⁵ Note that this term could also incorporate effects of group differences in unobserved variables (Jann, 2008).

⁶ Marginal probabilities computed for all regressions, however, not reported due to space constraints.

⁷ The argument that females are more risk-averse is also supported by Blackaby et al. (2005).