This article examines whether, and to what extent, gender, meritocratic factors, and non-meritocratic mechanisms shape the transition to full professorship in sociology and demography in France. We draw on a unique longitudinal dataset covering the complete population of individuals who were recruited as assistant professors (“maîtres de conferences”) in sociology/demography (CNU section 19) at French universities between years 2000 and 2020s and follow their careers through 2021. Combining non-anonymous administrative records from the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research (MESRI) with manually coded information on publications, administrative responsibilities, awards, and institutional location, the dataset includes 658 individuals and allows for a detailed reconstruction of academic career trajectories. Using event history models, we estimate unconditional and conditional hazards of promotion to full professor, distinguishing between successive stages of the promotion process, including applications for qualification and for professorship positions. This approach makes it possible to identify how gender differences emerge across stages and to assess the contribution of each stage to the overall gender gap. We test a range of meritocratic explanations based on human and symbolic capital, such as publication quantity and quality, academic awards, and administrative experience, alongside non-meritocratic factors related to institutional prestige, geographic location, and mobility. Our results show that the gender gap in promotion to full professorship is substantial and arises primarily before candidates enter competition, with women being significantly less likely than men to apply for qualification, even at comparable levels of productivity. While differences in scientific production explain a large share of this gap, a non-negligible portion remains unexplained, pointing to gendered constraints related to mobility, costs of qualification, and self-selection. Moreover, persistent gender disparities at the final recruitment stage, particularly for external positions, suggest that discriminatory mechanisms in professorial hiring cannot be completely ruled out.
Greulich et al. (Fri,) studied this question.