Pink queue and double standard: new evidence on gender gaps from the Italian academia

Abstract Gender disparities in academic careers remain pronounced, particularly in access to the highest ranks. This paper provides new evidence on these inequalities by modeling academic career progression as a dynamic process. Using a Markov multi-state model, we analyze transitions across academic ranks for the entire population of professors employed in Italian universities between 2016 and 2021. This approach allows us to estimate not only promotion probabilities, but also the expected time required to reach Full professorship. We find that women reach promotion with lower probability and in more years than men, even after accounting for their scientific research output, seniority, and willingness to compete. Although gender gaps narrow when considering an entire career horizon, they never disappear. Importantly, we document that women with a given level of research performance display promotion probabilities systematically similar to those of men with lower research performance, suggesting unequal returns to merit, mirroring other double standards observed in other sectors of the labor market. Our analysis also shows that for women it takes systematically more time to get promotion, a result labeled as pink queue. This study contributes both substantively, by providing a comprehensive assessment of gender disparities in academia, and methodologically, by demonstrating the value of dynamic multi-state models to enrich the study of career progression in structured labor markets.