Gender quotas in hiring committees: A boon or a bane for women?

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Abstract 

In 2015, the French government imposed a gender quota in academic hiring committees in order to increase the representation of women. Drawing on a unique dataset provided by French universities together with a difference-in-difference design, I estimate the causal effect of the reform on the probability of women being hired. I exploit the reform’s 40% threshold by assigning fields in universities whose committees were on average below the threshold to the treatment group, and those that were already respecting the quota to the control group. I show the reform backfired and significantly worsened both the ranking of women and their probability of being hired, with a treatment effect comparable to a 3 p.p. decrease in the share of women recruited. Since the negative effect of the reform is concentrated in committees that are helmed by men, this result seems to be driven by the reaction of men to the reform.


Bio

After performing a PhD under the joint supervision of Etienne Wasmer and José de Sousa in Sciences Po's Economics Department (2013-2018), Pierre Deschamps was a postdoctoral research fellow for the ECHOPPE project for one year. He is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI) of Stockholm University.

His field of research focuses on labour market and mobility. He aims at developing a structural model of international mobility. He currently works with José de Sousa on a project funded by LIEPP, on racial discrimination and international labour mobility.