The gendered nature of academic institutions: a gender-analysis of Italian Universities

The academic fields are highly gendered, with men being overrepresented in the highest academic positions, while women tend to occupy the lower and more precarious positions, which indicates the existence of an academic ‘glass ceiling’. Most Italian academic institutions have policies on gender equality and/or diversity, but a common problem is a lack of transparency and gender-disaggregated data. Information such as sex-disaggregated data is essential to carry out gender- equality analysis and to analyse important decision-making processes from a gender perspective. In this paper, we assess the gendered nature of Italian universities by investigating the structure of academic positions by gender at both public and private universities from 2011 to 2017, with the help of gender-disaggregated statistics. Furthermore, we also analyse the gender segregation patterns in the data by geographical area. We document the persistence of a gender gap in a typical Italian academic career. Indeed, the empirical investigation finds that in 2017, while the proportion of women academic staff was 40.2%, women made up only 37.5% of associate professors and 23% of full professors. The results indicate that gender segregation in Italian universities has been reduced over time but is far from eliminated. Despite positive changes achieved in recent years, the study reveals a prevailing vertical segregation in Italian universities, i.e., a significant under- representation of women in the higher ranks of academia.