Cournot seminar – Alienor Bisantis (AMSE)

Event details :

We are pleased to welcome to the next session of the BETA Cournot seminar organised with the support of the FSEG on Tuesday 05/05 at 2:00pm:

Alienor Bisantis (AMSE)

who will present her paper entitled

Gender and Academic Mobility

Abstract: What explains the gender gap in academic careers? This paper studies how geographic mobility constraints contribute to gender disparities in academic hiring, using novel administrative data covering the universe of PhD graduates in France (2009-2021) across all academic fields. I link individuals to the full set of job openings in their field to analyze job search behavior and the probability of obtaining a first academic job. First, I show that women apply to positions that are within a shorter distance, targeting universities near their PhD institution. Second, I leverage quasi-random variation in the geographic structure of the job market across fields and cohorts to show that when available jobs are farther away, applications and hiring fall, especially for women. Finally, I quantify the role of mobility constraints in the hiring gap: conditional on facing the same job market structure, women’s stronger sensitivity to distance lowers their probability of obtaining a first academic job in their first year of application by 1.71 percentage points relative to men, representing about 20% of the average hiring rate. Taken together, the findings highlight geographic mobility constraints as a meaningful and previously underexplored mechanism contributing to gender disparities in academic careers.