Longitudinal evidence on Norwegian PhDs suggests slower progression for women academics but not a leaky pipeline
Date
2024-09-10
Version
Published version
OA Version
Citation
S. Kahn, D. Aksnes, M. Ulvestad, R. Reiling. "Longitudinal evidence on Norwegian PhDs suggests slower progression for women academics but not a leaky pipeline" Studies in Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2024.2400545
Abstract
We use longitudinal data on the entire population of Norwegian PhD recipients over five decades to examine the reason only 1/3 of full professors in Norway are women, despite gender balance among current PhDs. We find that 90% of the lower female representation is due to lower female shares in earlier PhD cohorts, increasing sizes of cohorts, and decreasing overall rates of promotion, which together we call “compositional/historical factors.” We find that the small remaining imbalance is not caused by women dropping out but rather by 15%-21% slower average promotion rates calculated in hazard analysis. However, on average, women eventually catch up with men after about 20 years, although this differs by field. We conduct a similar hazard analysis for the US and find that women doctorates are less likely than men to enter tenure-track academia although more likely to enter non-tenure-track academia. This leads to larger US gender differences in advancement to full professorships and no eventual convergence. We suggest possible reasons for the differences between Norway and the US.
Description
License
© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.