Other research programmes

FEMALE-CONQUEST: Female Conquest of Labour Markets: Enlightening Lessons from Biomedical Fields and Academia

Imagen

Specific programme: Convocatoria del año 2022 del procedimiento de concesión de ayudas a proyectos «Europa Excelencia», del Plan Estatal de Investigación Científica, Técnica y de Innovación para el período 2021-2023, en el marco del Plan de Recuperación, Transformación y Resiliencia.

Code: EUR2022-134025

UPV/EHU Partner Status: Beneficiary

UPV/EHU PI: Nagore Iriberri

Project start: 01/12/2022
Project end:   30/11/2024
 

Brief description:  The labour force is not distributed in a gender neutral manner. There is both horizontal and vertical segregation. Women are underrepresented in some

fields, such as STEM, and overrepresented in other fields, such as biomedical fields. Within a field or profession, women are also underrepresented in the top positions. Importantly, over the last century, there has been progress in both dimensions: women are conquering their share of the labour market.

Does the existing gender representation affect gender gaps in performance? This project proposes an empirical approach for documenting and understanding how women have progressed in the conquest of the labour markets in biomedical fields and across different fields in academia. Analytically, the lack of datasets that contained individual level performance data has been a pervasive limitation. I propose the use of two new databases, with rich individual level performance data, that will overcome this limitation. The first one is administrative data that includes, since 1983 to 2019, all recent graduates in medicine, nursing, psychology, pharmacy, biology, chemistry and physics, who take an annual standardized test, which will give them access to a finite and highly demanded set of postgraduate specialization positions in the Spanish Health System. The second database will

include all male and female academic scholars who work in different fields (STEM, natural and social sciences), as well as their academic performance: publications and citations, over the past century.

Empirical analysis of these two new databases will allow measuring and understanding the female conquest of labour markets. The final objective is to draw policy conclusions that would facilitate the female conquest.

EUR2022-134025, financiado por AEI/10.13039/501100011033 y por la Unión Europea “NextGenerationEU”/PRTR.