Women in research and higher education
Over the last years, women have made a significant progress in academia and science across all Europe. Yet, their representation across scientific fields and ranks remains uneven, as they are still under-represented in some STEM disciplines (science technology engineering and mathematics) and in senior positions. The WIRED project – Women In Research and higher EDucation – aims at investigating gender inequalities in academia by focusing on the reasons why and the mechanisms through which women are at disadvantage in the career progression and/or they drop-out from the academic labour market. It will undertake this challenge by means of an innovative, comparative, inter-disciplinary, multi-model and multi-level research. WIRED draws its originality from its unique data, which are the result of the combination of observational longitudinal micro-data on the Swiss and Italian academic populations with experimental data on gender discrimination in the selection processes. The observational field will be based on different administrative and web-based data sources, including the micro data on academics held by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research and by the Swiss Federal Statistical Office, where the fieldwork will be undertaken. The experimental research is based on a vignette survey which will be submitted to a sample of professors in targeted Italian and Swiss Universities, chosen on the base of the results of the first part of the research. The combination of these two methods within a comparative approach will provide an extremely rich and comprehensive understanding of gender differences in academic career trajectories allowing to simultaneously shed light on the micro, meso and macro levels of explanation. Face to the scarcity of comparative and longitudinal insights, WIRED will represent a tremendous step forward in the debate on women in academia and science.