03/02/2025 - 12:45 - LECL60 

Aliénor Bisantis

(Aix-Marseille School of Economics)

will give a presentation on 

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 between 2009 and 2021 across all academic fields. I link individuals to the full set of job openings in their field and year of first application to analyze job search behavior and outcomes. First, I show that women apply to fewer positions, over shorter distances, and are more likely to target 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 candidates facing more distant openings apply to fewer positions and are less likely to secure a job. Women respond more negatively to geographically distant markets, making them more exposed to these spatial frictions. Finally, I quantify the extent to which mobility constraints contribute to gender gaps in hiring: conditional on facing the same job market structure, women’s stronger sensitivity to distance lowers their probability of securing a position 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.

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