Gender, merit, and social capital in national accreditation: time to tenure‑track promotion in spanish management and organization studies

Abstract Women remain underrepresented in senior academic positions despite formal, ostensibly meritocratic promotion systems in many European countries, including Spain. National accreditation by the Spanish quality and accreditation agency (ANECA) is a mandatory gateway for promotion to permanent university positions, yet little is known about whether gender, meritocratic achievements, and social capital shape the time needed to obtain accreditation. This article analyses 751 accreditation processes in the field of Management and Organization Studies, focusing on applications for profesor titular (associate professor) and catedrático (full professor) positions. The dependent variable is processing duration in days, while predictors capture gender, target rank, scientific merit (h‑index), supervisor prestige, and the strength of the co‑authorship relationship between applicants and their doctoral supervisors. Robust multiple regression, complemented with polynomial specifications and subgroup models, shows that accreditation decisions are processed slightly faster for applicants to profesor titular (associate professor) than to catedrático (full professor), and for candidates with higher h‑indices and more prestigious supervisors. Stronger co‑authorship ties to supervisors are associated with longer processing times, and the overall explained variance remains modest. Gender does not significantly predict processing duration once other variables are controlled for, although exploratory subgroup evidence suggests that the association between merit and processing time may differ across gender and rank. The findings nuance existing claims about gendered disadvantage in Mediterranean national accreditation systems, highlighting the limits of using processing time as a proxy for bias and pointing to the need for richer data on success probabilities, committee composition, and informal networking mechanisms.