Factors influencing the academic career – an event history analysis

In this paper we used an event history analysis to investigate whether grants do have an effect on appointments as full professor, and whether there are gender differences in career success. After controlling for several variables (academic performance, faculty, academic age, cum laude), we found that grants and gender do have an effect, and the odds ratios suggest a considerable effect of gender. The Pseudo-R2 of the analysis is 0.1234.

The robustness check suggests that most of the findings are not much influenced by the random censoring (the participants leaving the system), but this does not apply to the gender variable: much more women leave the system than men, and therefore the level of gender bias is most likely underestimated. The Pseudo-R2 of the analysis of the robustness check is 0.1895.

The findings do suggest that grants are rather influential for academic careers in the Dutch context – even more for women than for men, which means that grant selection should be very valid in order to have fair career chances. Above that, and after controlling for grants and for other performance dimensions, appointments to full professor still show considerable gender bias, at least for the cohorts between 2000 and 2005 – the younger generations of today’s professors.

In a next version we will add a few other explanatory variables, like the ERC grants and add the predictive margins for the logistic regression, in order to analyze the effects of gender on the outcomes more in detail.