Merit Is Not Enough

In Italian academia, job candidacies are evaluated through lenses favoring those with research similarities with evaluators themselves, to the detriment of women. The selection of future faculty not only rewards the quality of research, but also responds — quietly but systematically — to an unstated requirement: disciplinary matching with committee members who decide who is chosen for a research position. This mechanism, in an environment still dominated by men, ends up producing predictable consequences: the merit of women matters, but it is not enough.

In the paper "Research Similarity and Women in Academia" (Piera Bello, Alessandra Casarico, Debora Nozza), currently being published in The Economic Journal, we surveyed all Italian tenure-track competitions in economics between 2014 and 2021, over 40,000 abstracts of publications by candidates and examiners, and used artificial intelligence techniques to measure the distance or similarity between research lines and methodologies of candidates and committee members. This is not a simple disciplinary label, but a metric capable of capturing academic interests, scientific language and research approaches. The question was straightforward: how important is thematic affinity in assessing merit?

Do Research Affinities Matter?

The answer is unequivocal: they matter! Candidates whose research interests are closer to those of committee members have a significantly higher probability of winning a job competition. In certain cases, this outweighs having publications in highly respected journals. Not because similarity indicates quality, but because we value more what we recognize as close to our scientific identity: this is the self-image bias, which is widely documented in psychology. 

And this is where gender comes into play. Men and women do not differ in the average quality of their research, nor in the average degree of similarity with respect to search committees. However, men are more likely than not to have at least one committee member very similar to them, while women are not. As long as committees remain predominantly male, it is inevitable that female candidates will encounter fewer relevant "affinities." A minor detail? No: a significant source of bias.

Gender Bias

When we include in the model candidate selection by means of a job interview — who is invited, who shows up — it clearly emerges that, for same level of CV, women have a lower probability of winning. And part of this gap is explained precisely by the lower probability of having that similarity peak which, as we show, is particularly rewarding in the evaluation process.

The consequences go beyond inequity: they undermine the vitality of the economic discipline. A system that breeds on familiarity tends to replicate itself, discouraging diversity in scientific careers and narrowing the scope of issues posed by economics. At a time when research should expand its view, not narrow it, this is a cost we can ill afford.