Gender Discrimination and Evaluators' Gender: Evidence from Italian Academia

Relying on a natural experiment consisting in 130 competitions for promotion to associate and full professor in Italian universities, we analyse whether gender discrimination is affected by the gender of evaluators. We examine the probability of success of each candidate in relation to the committee gender composition, exploiting the random assignment of evaluators and controlling for candidates' scientific productivity and a number of individual characteristics. We find that female candidates are less likely to be promoted when the committee is composed exclusively of males, while the gender gap disappears when the candidates are evaluated by a mixed-sex committee.