The Glass Door of Academia: Unveiling New Gendered Bias in Academic Recruitment

Abstract

Gender statistics and studies on gendering mechanisms have been developing over recent years on two parallel tracks. This research reveals the need to rethink the standard indicators used in European comparative analyses to identify (1) gender-related mechanisms responsible for the production and reproduction processes of gender asymmetries, (2) their specificities in different local contexts, and (3) the profound transformations that have characterized the academies and the research system in Europe in recent years. The paper analyses the data on the composition of Italian academia provided by the Italian Ministry of Education, universities and research from a gender perspective. The introduction of the glass door index, specifically designed to measure gendering processes taking place in the recruitment stages in Italian academia, discloses new forms of gender segregation in Italian universities after the last academic reform (Law 240/2010), despite the emphasis placed on the neutral and meritocratic criteria of the new recruitment and career progression rules.

Just a Matter of Time? Women’s Career Advancement in Neo-Liberal Academia. An Analysis of Recruitment Trends in Italian Universities

“…In the same post-reform period, a slight improvement in the recruitment of female associates has occurred, in a sort of "convergence" of the disadvantage. The analysis conducted on recruitment data confirms previous studies based on stock data that suggest that the reform has "anticipated" the adverse selection of women from the associate level, as it was before the reform, at the assistant professor level, and, more particularly, in the access to tenure track positions (Gaiaschi et al 2018;Picardi 2019).…”

“…Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, including frequency distributions, cross-tables, and segregation indexes, including the glass ceiling index (European Commission 2019), the glass door index (Picardi 2019), and a new index that we propose: the bottleneck index. The Glass Ceiling Index (GCI) (European Commission 2019) is internationally used to measure the under-representation in the top positions of the academic career ladders; that is, among full professors.…”

“…Paralleling the growing interest, within the debate on gender and academia, towards the early career phases, an additional index has recently been proposed, the Glass Door Index (GDI) (Picardi 2019), measuring the under-representation of women in accessing grade C. In the definition proposed by Picardi, grade C is even stricter as it includes only tenure track positions; that is, the RU for the years before the reform and the RTDb for the years after the reform. The reason for including only RTDb in the index in the years after the reform is the fact that it can be considered, if not formally at least de facto, a tenure position.…”

“…Given the particular structure of the Italian academic career-which is characterized by a long period of post-doc contracts (or other non-stable contracts) between the end of the Ph.D. and the possible appointment as assistant professor-the combination of these two elements is likely to have extended the time of precarity for young researchers. Some recent contributions (Gaiaschi et al 2018;Picardi 2019) suggest that these transformations have entailed some "gender implications", such as an increase in the adverse selection for women in the early stages of their career ladder and, more particularly, in access to tenure track positions. On the other hand, data on the gender distribution of men and women working in Academia point to an amelioration of the female representation in the final ranks of the career ladder, both in Italy and in Europe (European Commission 2019).…”

Indonesian Women in Public Service Leadership: A Rapid Review

“…The disparity of women in Indonesia's public service upper echelons is not a unique phenomenon. Research internationally evidences the 'glass door' phenomena in which women's careers are inhibited as early as the recruitment phases where getting on career-track is inequitable in the first place (Picardi 2019). Other researchers critique the effect of social barriers and institutional blockages that impede women's movement to the upper management echelons, known as the 'glass ceiling' (Azmi et al 2012;Forster 1999;Jalalzai 2008;Yukongdi and Benson 2005;Coleman 2010;O'Neil and Hopkins 2015;Newman 2016;Curtin 2019;De Simone et al 2018).…”