Research Similarity and Women in Academia

Piera Bello, Alessandra Casarico and Debora Nozza

No 10657, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We investigate the extent to which research similarity between senior and junior researchers influences promotion in academia and study its implications in terms of gender diversity among faculty. Using data on the universe of job applications for tenure-track assistant professor positions in economics in Italy and exploiting NLP techniques (i.e., document embeddings) on the abstract of each publication of the scholars in our dataset, we propose a novel measure of research similarity, which can capture closeness in research topics, methodologies or policy relevance between candidates and members of selection committees. We show that the level of similarity is strongly associated with the winning probability. Moreover, while there are no gender differences in average similarity, maximum similarity with members of the selection committee is lower for female candidates. This gender gap disappears when similarity is calculated only focusing on female members of the committee. The results suggest that similarity bias in male-dominated environments can have implications for gender and research diversity.

Keywords: cosine similarity; document embeddings; academia; economics; gender differences; labour force composition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 J71 J82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-gen, nep-lab and nep-sog
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_10657

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