Teaching, visibility and scholarly production: a gender-based inquiry into a case of professorship competition in Italy

Quantitative analysis on a wide and important case of academic competition in Economics. The approach is gender based. The focus is primarily on the recruitment though there is an effort to look also at the structure of the Academy in economic disciplines. Anglo-Saxon, and especially American, literature has been delving into the relationship between women and the labor market for more than thirty years. Some attention has also been given to the relative position of women in the academic hierarchy. Italy and - with some exceptions - the rest of Europe seem to be completely absent from the latter debate. Thus, results of the American institutional context have been extensively generalized. The aim of this paper is to offer a different scenario for the field of Economics in Italy. This study is a quantitative analysis of training, teaching and scholarly publications of 277 Italian economists; i.e. a group that applied for the pre-last competition carried out for tenure track positions as Associate Professor in Economics. A gender disaggregation is explicitly used, with the aim of understanding which additional information a similar perspective would reveal.