Good afternoon. I'm Marianne Bitler, and I'm the Interim Director of the Institute for Social Sciences.
And I'm happy to invite you to our
lecture by Jenna Stearns. These lectures illuminate the fascinating and important social sciences research
taking place on our campus
especially by new faculty this year.
We're trying to have people who are new to UC Davis give these talks as opposed to calling on our folks
who have been here for a long time. Hopefully, this is introducing our new faculty to more people, although we maybe weren't as successful today as we might have hoped.
Before I introduce Jenna, I want to draw your attention to some other things. So first, on Friday May 18th, were having a day-long Training
Researchers to Improve Policy
Conference. Just to make clear what that is, this conference is intended to help
researchers get their research into policy makers' hands and the hands of other people who are influencers like the media,
think tanks, etc. Okay, it's a day-long
Conference. It should be really interesting and there's going to be a panel at the end of the day
that's some UC faculty and then Dan Moraine
will also talk about this issue with the perspective that's local.
And if anybody is interested in that and I didn't already spam you with this, you can email me
and I'll send you the link. On Wednesday May 30th,
Kathleen Carly at Carnegie Mellon will present the 2018 Sheffrin Lecture and Public Policy and her talk will be titled "Social
Influence in Cyberspace" and
you can find out more about all these events on our awesome newsletter, our website, and a variety of other places.
So presenting for us today is Assistant Professor of Economics Jenna Stearns.
Jenna earned a PhD at UC Santa Barbara and joined us this past fall. Her primary research interests include family, gender, education,
and health economics.
And she's particularly interested in the relationship between fertility choices and investment in human capital.
Her current research examines the effect of family-friendly policies on labor market choices, productivity, family structure, education, and health outcomes.
She's already had her work published in a whole variety of places including JHE and JAP.
Please join me in welcoming Jenna. You can see the title.
Today we're going to talk about Tenure Clock Stopping Policies, which are policies that allow
new parents
who are tenure-track assistant professors at research universities
to stop or extend their tenure clocks for one year upon the birth or adoption of a child.
This is joint work with some co-authors Kelley Bedard at UC Santa Barbara
and Heather Antecol from Claremont McKenna.
So in this paper we're really interested in thinking of a little bit different type of family-friendly policy than the one you maybe
typically are used to hearing about --something like family leave or
flexible work schedules or something like that. Policies that essentially changed the time that you spend at work.
This is a slightly different type of policy that instead changes the way we think about or we measure productivity
around the time of birth.
And so tenure clock stopping policies really only apply to people who are
on the tenure track,
primarily at research focused universities.
We're gonna more specifically even than that
focus on the tenure and other productivity outcomes of assistant professors in economics. So
before I go into kind of these
policies and what we're going to actually do, I wanted to start with just a little bit of a broader picture of why you might
think this same type of policy, policies that again change the way we measure productivity
around the time of birth, might be more broadly applicable
to high skill men and women, more generally.
So as most of you are probably aware, in the US and in many other countries
we still see fairly significant gender gaps and labor market outcomes
between men and women.
We think a lot of the remaining gender gap is actually a family gap, meaning it can be explained by the presence of children
in the household.
This is true even for very high skill
professionals, which is a little bit interesting to the extent that we think that
high skill women self-select into
time intensive careers,
careers that require a lot of investment in human capital.
So it's a little bit interesting that we still see these big gaps in their labor market outcomes. So here I've just plotted
the share of women in four highest skill
occupations that all require advanced degrees,
at age thirty and then again for the same cohort of individuals at age forty. This was the 1970 cohort.
So the four professions
I've plotted here are lawyers, doctors,
post-secondary teachers, and then people in business, and the blue bar shows just the share of women in these professions
at age 30 and again at age 40.
What I think is more interesting though is the orange bars show the share of women in the top
25 percent of that occupation age-specific
earnings distribution, and so what I want to point out here is between age
30 and 40, we see women falling out of these high-skilled professions all together.
But I think more interestingly,
we see women falling out of the share of top earners. So for some reason,
women are less likely to move up within these occupations at the same rate.
We have a leaky pipeline problem, not just out of work altogether, but you know a lack of upward mobility in one's career.
So why might that be the case for these types of women?
Many of these high skilled occupations
have really rapid periods of human capital accumulation and steep promotion tracks early on in
the career, in the first decade of one's working life. This is particularly salient
for high skill women, when their prime fertility years correspond to these really important years in terms of
human capital accumulation and moving up
in their professions.
Additionally, these professions are often characterized by what we call upper out
environments or kind of ladder career structures, where if you're not promoted at a set fixed point in time,
it's very hard to be promoted later on or to continue on the same upward mobility track.
The best example, of course, of up-or-out type environments is the tenure system and in academia,
where if you don't go earn tenure at a fixed point in time, you're out of a job.
But we see the same sort of up-or-out system in law with a partner track, in
medicine especially in hospital settings, and certain types of business and finance as well.
So combined with the fact that this early part of your career that corresponds with prime childbearing years is really important, and
if you don't move up at these fixed points in time, if at that kind of prescribed rate you don't succeed,
it's perhaps not surprising we see these gaps.
I think the other important thing to realize here is that even that we've seen a
pretty dramatic increase in the availability of family-friendly policies for high skill workers, both at the
institutional level and also within specific firms,
many of that as I mentioned earlier many of the typical
family-friendly policies that we think of, like family leave again, the ability to have a more flexible work hour schedule, etc
don't adequately account for the fact that the productivity loss
associated with having a child is fairly large and persists a lot longer than in the case of family leave just a few weeks
surrounding the birth.
Additionally, these policies again all just change the time where your spec expected to be physically present in the office and
they don't change the underlying way we think about productivity. So if you're in a career where
time at work and productivity are not necessarily the same thing, for example, if you're an academic
and your productivity is based on how many publications you publish over your whole career and
not you know how many sales you ring up, conditional on actually being at work,
then these policies that change the time that you have to be physically present at work
aren't going to really be enough to overcome this fact that having a child is very costly.
Okay, so having children may be expected actually even in the presence of these family-friendly policies to reduce the probability that women are
promoted because you're early productivity still falls. So we want to think again of a different type of family from the policy, one
that's going to change the way we measure productivity.
We're going to do this by looking at tenure clock stopping policies. So tenure clock stopping policies are policies that
have been adopted by primarily research universities is over the past few decades,
that allow assistant professors on their tenure track to stop or extend their tenure clock for one year
upon the birth or adoption of a child.
Yes
You may be getting to this, but is there any is there
any examples of law firms or hospitals trying this type of policy like giving extensions on the partnership tracker? Or they just don't even?
So there's been some very independent cases
I know about in law where certain law firms have kind of changed the
requirements for mothers,
typically for example, in law if you're on a partner track you're expected to have some absurd number of billable hours a year
over your entire career and
again, the same problem kind of exists in law for the most part where even if you're like
technically on maternity leave or something like that, you're still supposed to have been accumulating billable hours,
and so again
there's a couple kind of not systematic by any means and a couple of law firms that have tried to
essentially really think about maternity leave as a
true time away or to kind of accommodate more of a temporary in the key in all of this is a temporary part-time
work schedule that doesn't interfere or changes the way they kind of evaluate billable hours during that particular period.
But it's not widespread, and law I think is is
particularly bad for women in the top law firms in the same way
that the tenure track is in terms of you know it really is billable hours over a career. I haven't seen anything in
medicine similar to this, but you might think that you could implement kind of a same thing again, especially in hospital settings
that are quite closely tied to academic structure.
Yeah, that's a big question.
I would imagine that would matter to some extent.
But at the same time you still see women in both law and medicine falling out of these professions over time
even though they have this massive amount of debt and
to the extent that you know they know they're going to have to repay this, debt, that's
not probably, we wouldn't expect that to happen,
so I think I'm not sure I would expect it to be entirely different because it looks like something is still happening
that's not expected. <questioner> Sure I just wondered. I haven't thought about that actually. I
don't think it would change
the role that you know a similar type of policy could play. I don't see any reason why it would prevent the existence of
similar type of policy
but I haven't thought too much about
that specific case.
But one of the important things about
tenure clock stopping policies that actually might address some of these points is that they're
independent of any sort of policy that changes compensation.
So
tenure clock stopping policies really just extend the amount of time on your tenure clock, the amount of time before you go up for an
evaluation
They don't change your workload
directly. They don't change
compensation during periods of leave. They're completely unrelated to actual leave taking.
So in the university case for example, they're not tied to course release policies.
They're not tied to leave of absence policies. All these policies
do is change the amount of time you can take before you go up for tenure.
Okay, and again you know, when we're thinking about debt or something like that
it's very you know so long as you need to have a job filled, it's not costly to have
me versus someone else in my job on the
university administration's perspective or the hospital administration's or the law partner's
perspective, and so in that sense, I don't think you know these things like debt or
the time it takes to enter into your first job or something really affect
the ability of these policies to work in the way they're intended, which is simply to allow you to to reevaluate
productivity around the birth.
What tenure clock stopping policy is and
essentially as I said right, you know the standard tenure clock, let's say is six years, I would go up for tenure in my sixth
year, if I have a kid now, I can go up a year later
in my 7th year. The way the policies are supposed to work in theory is that that extra year is supposed to be totally
disregarded when tenure evaluators are making evaluations. So my outside letter writers,
the people voting on my tenure case within the university, are supposed to be told to treat me as if
I'm still in my sixth year even though
I'm going up into my seventh year. So that extra year is not supposed to count essentially. In practice this doesn't actually happen
both because people ignore the directions that they're given
and because people are not given the directions that they're supposed to be. And there is evidence that both of these things go on.
So you know,
understanding how people are actually making tenure evaluations is going to be important when thinking about the impacts of these policies
because if the time is not actually
disregarded or discounted, then the policies wouldn't be expected to work very well.
Okay in this paper, we're gonna leverage the fact that
tenure clock stopping policy has started to become common in research universities in the
1980s, and we saw a fairly steady rollout over time from the mid 1980s to the mid
2000s in the existence of these policies.
The earliest tenure clock stopping policies were what I'm going to call female-only policies.
They only applied to birth mothers, and in some instances primary caregivers, but you had to be a documented primary caregiver.
Over time gender-neutral policies that lead to become much more common. These are policies where both men and women get the same one year
extension upon the birth of their child. <question> What do you mean by documented primary caregiver?
Essentially you could not have a
spouse that wasn't employed full-time and you have to document that during business hours, you are home with the child at least 51 percent of the time.
So the policies that I'm going to call Female only,
typically are just policies that apply to birth mothers, if you actually physically give birth.
These primary
care policies that I'm going to code as primary care policies, are policies where you actually had to have fairly substantial documentation.
Again today these are quite uncommon.
Typically today we either have truly gender-neutral policies or
policies that are significant care policies, which means you have to play some role in childcare, and it's largely unenforceable.
But that kind of significant caregiver policy, I'm going to call it gender-neutral policy, where essentially and effectively
anyone can take up the benefit.
So we're going to leverage the fact that there's a large variation in
implementation across universities over time. In the sample
I'm going to look at, which is going to be the top 50 research universities with economics PhD programs. Over this period,
50% of those universities are going to only ever have a gender-neutral tenure clock stopping policy,
20% are going to switch at some point from a female only policy to a gender-neutral version,
and then 14% have a female only policy, and then about
16% never adopt a policy during our sample period. The important thing I should mention here is that these policies are adopted at the
university level. They're uncorrelated with the decisions in any particular
department. In our case, in this short talk
I'm not going to go into kind of the details about this with economics,
but we can show the adoption of these policies are uncorrelated with
department characteristics and future hiring decisions. They're also uncorrelated with
university-wide characteristics.
<question> Gender-neutral policies,
are they mandate or option? Do people have to take the one-year, and if they have a child and
they decide to go up
after six years, are they still
going to mandate that you ignore that one year? No.
The mandate part of these policies is that it's
automatically approved. So if you give birth, you don't have to appeal. Or
even if you don't give birth, if you're a father and your wife or your spouse has a kid,
you don't have to appeal to anyone for a
special case of oh I need an extension. It has to be automatically approved. Now
it's your choice if you want to go up early, and if you go up early
they're going to evaluate you based on when you go up and not the extension.
<Question> So in all cases is the person that decides to apply and then if he applies?
And the key part here is that these are automatic, so it's it's not you know you can in some cases you can get
clock extensions for other things. For example, if you have a large medical
issue or a medical emergency, often you can request a clock extension and those are often at the discretion of the
Provost or the Chancellor or someone else.
These are automatically approved.
But of course and it's important to know you can go up early. So if you think
your tenure case is very solid and you're going to get tenure anyway, you're not going to end up using the extra time.
Okay, so in this paper
we're gonna look at whether or not these policies and specifically we're going to be interested in the gender-neutral policies affect tenure outcomes and other
measures of career success. And we're gonna focus on how they may differentially affect men and women.
So what we're going to find just to preview the results here is that gender neutral policies substantially increase tenure rates for men.
They're benefitting from this extra time or the potential to take extra time, but they significantly decrease tenure rates for women.
So this is actually increasing the gender gap in tenuring in Economics.
We find evidence that this is driven, at least in part, by an increase in the top-five publication rate for men.
So if you're not familiar with Economics, there's a very high premium to publishing in the very top set of
Economics journals.
And we see increases in publication rates in this group, which suggests a change in strategy, which I'll talk about that in more detail.
Okay, so I think it's important, before I go into kind of the estimation and showing you the results, to think about why we might
expect these policies to work or not work.
And why they might differentially affect men and women. So there's a lot of ways that these policies could theoretically work.
I'm just gonna focus on a couple of reasons for today.
A channel that changes how people are evaluated and a channel that
changes how people behave. So the first thing these policies
do is just give people more time before they have to go up for tenure.
So even in the absence of any change in your own behavior,
either your own publication strategy or your own productivity or your fertility choices.
Without any change on your own behavior, the presence of more time is gonna increase the probability you get tenure.
If you're kind of publishing at some constant rate.
You have that extra year to get that last publication published. You have that extra year to get the last paper
out, etc. And so this is going to have a direct effect on
publications just through the channel, regardless of behavioral role.
We can also think that in this case where all this does is give you extra time the way we evaluate that extra time
is gonna matter quite a lot. If men, on average, are more productive
than women during the period around birth, then if these policies are
not fully discounted, meaning that you're actually still expected to
be productive during that time where your tenure clock is technically stopped,
then men are going to look relatively better than women as a result of these policies.
And I think it's not unreasonable to think that
because women often bear the cost of being pregnant, they often bear the cost of things like breastfeeding,
and it's not unreasonable to think they're going to be
less productive during this.
We can also think that these policies change behavior itself.
So ignore any changes in how people are evaluated.
You know I know I'm going to get some extra time on my tenure clock, so I can actually change my strategy
for how I try and publish early on in my career.
That's extra time may cause me
not just to increase the number of papers I publish through the time channel, but I also actually might change my strategy.
I might say well now it's less risky
tor me to send my papers to journals that are high quality but have low acceptance rates
because if they don't get accepted
I have more time to try again.
And I can always send it to that less risky journal later on because I have that extra time to do it again.
Okay, and so this extra time may lead people especially people that expect to use the extra year fairly
productively, to fundamentally change the strategies they embark on
early on in their career.
Even if I don't have a kid right now,
the fact that I know I might have a kid before tenure
and so I could take that extra time if I need it,
might be enough to have people change these strategies again early on in their careers.
So if you know kind of either of these things is true, if either the number of
publications increases through the extra time or the quality of the publications increases either through the extra time or through this kind of more behavioral
channel, then we might have kind of this third indirect effect where department tenure standards actually
increase. In
Economics during this time period about 80 percent of assistant professors are male.
You think if some men look relatively better even if women don't look any worse
on an absolute standard, maybe they look a little bit worse compared to their colleagues.
Okay, so we think tenure decisions are at all made on some sort of relative standard,
or if we think we're in a world where people are competing for a fixed number of slots,
then these policies might have differential effects by gender
because the extra time benefits men more than women.
And then finally the...<Question> So that channel is like the childless
person is at a disadvantage too? Yeah.
And then if you know if enough men are having kids that they all you know enough enough of them look relatively better,
this is going to be expected to hurt
childless individuals as well.
You know it's not clear how tenure decisions are made. It varies across departments.
We're not going to be able to explore this very precisely,
but we do see evidence that in
departments where it looks like there's more of a competitive environment or maybe a fixed number of slots,
these effects are a little bit stronger, so I think part of that is at work.
That's more conjectural at this stage? Yes. it's conjectural like it. I can show you some
actually, I probably won't today, and then there's some
tables that show creative differences by
the department rank and stuff like that and a public and private. So if you think in private school
there's more about kind of fixed number of tenure slots, you'd kind of expect it there. And that's what we see.
I'll show you some descriptive evidence on fertility.
We're not gonna separate the results based on whether you actually have a child or not for two reasons. One is that
the fertility data is from a survey so
there are some sample selection issues.
The second is again. I don't think you know the one thing I do when we don't think that this
policy or behavioral change as a result of these
policies would result only among the people that ultimately have a kid or ultimately use the tenure clock extension.
You know if enough people are at the margin of
thinking that they might have a child
before tenure or they want to have a child in the couple of years before or after tenure,
and they're willing to at least entertain the possibility of changing the timing of their fertility
this could cause these kind of early on effects, where you change your strategy, it works out, and then actually you don't need to
to use the tenure clock extension because it looks like you're gonna get tenure anyway.
And so because of kind of that option value because you know we can think of these policies as affecting everyone who
places some positive weight on the probability of having a child around tenure,
we don't want to actually condition on fertility.
But I will show you again some
descriptive evidence that suggests this does change fertility behavior.
Okay, so finally again the policy might change fertility behavior. You
might be more likely to have a kid because this lowers the expected cost of doing so in terms of your career outcomes.
Okay so to test these mechanisms and answer this question, we've compiled two unique data
sets. The first is a just a list of the tenure clock stopping policies at
49 of the top 50 Economics departments
in the US. So these are departments with PhD programs.
We want to focus here on top departments because we want tenure to be tied very closely to
publications and not to other things
like
teaching which we can't measure, but also that wouldn't benefit so much from time.
The second data set that we collected I think it's much more interesting.
It's a data set that contains the academic employment histories and publication records for every
assistant professor hired at one of our universities
between 1980 and 2005.
So this sample
includes about
1600 assistant professors who were ever hired
as assistant professors at one of these top 50 universities. And the results I'm going to show you today
we're going to use about 1400 of them
using three kind of sample criteria. The first is that
we're going to limit the sample to people whose first job is in a top 50 Economics department.
The reason we want to focus on people and their first job is to avoid issues with endogenous moving in
response to having a clock stopping policy. We also want a sample where
productivity is measured by publications matches
the work that they did while in their job.
And so the second criteria is going to be to also limit
the sample to people who've started their first job within two years of finishing their PhD.
We're basically just throwing out the few people who did long PostDocs here. PostDocs in Economics are relatively uncommon,
especially during this period. Again, the reason for this it doesn't really matter in terms of the results
but we want because there's not that many of them, but we want
productivity again, as measured by publications, to match the work you do during your your assistant professor job.
The third sample restriction which again doesn't really matter
but reduces the noise
in our estimates a little bit, is we're going to limit the sample to people who published at least two papers within eight years of finishing
their PhD. Our sample is people who who get an assistant professor job at a talk of 50 university.
They're all publishing. The people who we're throwing out here is just a handful of people who leave after one or two years.
They were never on the margin of getting tenure.
They always go to the private sector and never show up in academia again.
The reason were we're kind of conditioning on publishing here
and not just you know spending at least two years in the university, is we want to allow people to move
into other jobs that might translate back into academia. So for example, some people go to the Fed or something like that.
They're still active. They're still researching. And often they show back up in a tenure track job
later on. But again none of these sample restrictions make much of a difference in our results. In the paper there's
robustness checks that show we can relax all of these and nothing really changes.
Okay, so I'm going to show you
results on a couple of different outcomes. Our main outcome today is whether you get tenure at,
what we're gonna call the policy university -- the University at would you start your first job.
I'll also show you what happens to the probability of getting tenure in the profession and any
college or university in the world,
at any time. I'll show you measures of academic
productivity as measured by publications.
And then I'll show you some measures of time to tenure and mobility.
And then again some very descriptive evidence on fertility.
These are kind of hard to see sorry, but the one thing I do want to mention is our sample is mostly male.
If you look at this top graph over here, this is the average number of assistant professors hired over time in our sample.
You can see that about 80% of the sample is male.
There's a small uptick in the share of women hired at the very end, but it's crazy.
Okay, so we're gonna
identify these effects using a simple panel model. This equation looks very complicated,
but really what we're gonna focus on is just this beta 1 and beta 2 coefficient. Beta 1 is going to be the effect of
being hired at one of these top 50 universities in a period where a gender-neutral tenure clock stopping policy is in place.
for men. And the beta 2 is going to be the additional effect for women.
Beta 5 and beta 6 are going to be those same effects for men and women of
having a female only
policy in place. So we're gonna allow the effects of these gender neutral policies and the female only policies to potentially differ.
And now we're just gonna allow the very early years after
policy
Implementation to have different effects. The reason we're going to do this is there's a lot of reasons to think that it might take some
time for these policies to work. For example, you might think no one wants to be a first mover.
You don't want to be the first person in your university or your department to use this new type of policy.
Additionally, if you think any of the effects are going to find work through changing tenure standards or changing
cultural norms or changing fertility outcomes, it might just take some time for that to happen. So
I'm going to show you results
for the very first couple of years after policy adoption and then the later years.
<Question> I'm just trying to understand. Do you have multiple observations for the same individual?
So, yes, we so we actually have quite a nice dataset.
that has what happens to each individual in every year. The regressions
I'm going to show you, we're going to have one observation per year. So for example, do you
eventually get tenure in your first job. <Question> So how long do you follow them after?
We
follow them in our data forever.
I'll show you I think in our main results this is do you ever get tenure in your first job?
When I show your results for things like publications, it will be
by specific point in time. So for example, how many publications do you have by your 7th year or by your 8th year?
So everything we're gonna run is going to be one observation.
<Question> So when do you turn on the gender neutral policy? It's gonna be tied to when you're hired.
<Question> So if it was in place when you were hired? It's on forever.
So we we've played around with kind of the timing. So you might think
you know maybe it matters that there's one by the time you showed how to go up for tenure or something like that. It doesn't
really matter very much how we code this.
The reason we're doing it this way is that
when policies are implemented across universities, sometimes they're implemented
etroactively in the sense that you know if I'm a third-year assistant professor and a policy is implemented
and I had a kid last year, it would apply.
Sometimes it wouldn't. Sometimes it would only apply to people coming in.
And so we want to kind of hold the information
about the policy that you had at the time you started your job here. But again you know it doesn't really matter how we put it.
<Question> So again just to understand, for each individual it's either on or off? Exactly. There's no variation across individuals.
Do you have a policy when you're hired or not?
Okay, we can also control for a bunch of
time varying university controls. We can control for a couple of
time varying individual specific controls.
And then we're going to include gender specific year fixed effects for the year you're hired and
university fixed effects. These are going to be important because there are some fairly substantial time trends in both
hiring and the type of
person that universities are hiring over time.
Okay, so this is the main result of the paper. This table shows the effect of the clock stopping policies on the probability that you
get tenure in your first job at the policy university. So in this red box
I have this is the that beta 1-- the effect of being exposed to a gender-neutral
clock stopping policy when you're hired for men.
You can see it increases the probability of getting tenure, but about 17 percentage points. So this is quite a large effect.
Tenure rates are not super high. They're around 35% in our sample.
<Question> Are they time varying? Tenure rates, yes, a little bit.
So this is the tenure rate for men and women,
not conditional on anything. This is just kind of the raw data, so not conditional on the clock stopping policies.
So there's a little bit of an upward trend over time but
And then this shows the effects of the clock stopping policies for women. This is the total effect
Tenure rates
rates go down by quite a lot, by 19 percentage points.
So this is dramatically increasing the gender gap in tenure rates. Some of this is coming through
diverging trends in this period. In the absence of the policies, tenure rates for men were rising and tenure
Sorry, no, tenure rates for men were falling and tenure rates for women were rising, and this is essentially undoing that any progress that was
being made over this period.
The other interesting thing to see here is that if you look at the female only
policies, we see absolutely no effects for either men or women. So the female only
policies should have only applied to women. There shouldn't be an effect for men.
But they didn't really seem to work for women either. They didn't increase tenure rates. Although
I will say we always see fairly small and
insignificant
weight estimates, they are always positive.
Okay, so they didn't hurt women I think we can safely say.
We don't see any evidence of the policies had immediate effects. It does take a little bit of time for them to develop.
Just consistent with this idea that there's some learning going on
or some strategic behavior.
Okay, we can also look at effects on other
labor market outcomes. And the really interesting thing here is even though
we see these huge effects on the probability of getting tenure in your first job, we actually don't see any
significant effects of gender-neutral policies on the probability that women eventually get tenure anywhere in the profession.
Okay, so they're starting this is a sample of people who are starting at the top 50 universities and these are very
high academically
research oriented jobs.
This shows the probability that they eventually get tenure at any college or university in the world.
So you know they're certainly going somewhere else, but they're not leaving academia altogether.
And you might think kind of the obvious channel here would be well
they're just getting worse jobs, right? They don't get tenure out of top 50 university. They move somewhere
much lower ranked or or worse, right? It's actually really hard to measure changes in rate
over a 30-year period, but we have looked at
whether or not people are moving to higher or lower ranked universities.
So these are kind of institution specific. So
If you start at Harvard, we're gonna say if we move to MIT
that's not a lower ranked university, but if you move to Davis that would be a lower ranked university.
If you start at Davis and you move...
We're not looking just in and out of the top 50 where a lot of
what's coded as moving to lower ranks if you start at Harvard is different than if you start at
the University of Oregon or somewhere like that.
But when we do this, it's you know admittedly a little bit of a noisy measure or rank here.
We don't actually see any strong evidence or any evidence at all that women are
systematically moving to lower ranked universities. They're actually less likely to move down.
They're not statistically more likely to move up. That means they're they're making fairly lateral moves. Again,
these are noisy rankings,
but you know there's no systematic reason to think that women are losing their job in this top 50.
And they're all going to community colleges or they're all going to
CSU's.
So this suggests, I think that this is not all just a negative
productivity story, right? It's not just that women now are having more kids before tenure and therefore, they're less productive and therefore,
they're leaving research or leaving these types of
jobs. It does look like there's some sort of relative standard here, where maybe women look a little bit worse within their own department,
but in terms of the market as a whole, they don't
The other thing I'll just point out really quickly is that we do see evidence that
they're staying longer as a result of these
policies. So men are about 10 percentage points more likely
to take at least one extra year on their tenure clock, so are women although that's not
statistically significant.
Yeah
Yeah, so it would take some time for the effect to emerge. So these are all these kind of longer-term...
Yeah, so we don't see anything for the just early years. We can combine them all together.
It doesn't really change because there's a lot more years
not in the first couple.
But we don't ever see anything and it's in the paper, in those early years.
<Question> And you may get to this but are you going to look at actual productivity as well?
Actually kind of the number of publications that people in our sample have
by the seventh year after completing their PhD.
You can see men on average publish a little bit more than women.
In the absence of a policy there's not systematic differences across all US schools that will and will not adopt.
But it's a little bit interesting though that men just publish more, in general.
So here are the effects of the policies on publishing. So the first
four columns show the effect on the number of top five publications.
By year three, five, seven, and nine. So we've just shown a variety of years here because publishing takes some time.
It's not clear where we would expect to see effects.
So we see a couple of interesting things here one is that for men,
when they're exposed to gender neutral clock stopping policies,
it does appear that they're changing their publication strategies a little bit.
They're significantly more likely to have a top
publication or this is actually the number of top publications.
Once these policies are
implemented and it starts to show up around year five, so it does look like they're kind of changing.
To the extent that it takes a couple of years to get a top publication actually published,
it does look like they're changing their strategies relatively early on if this is its impact that explanation.
The effect what's really nice here
is that it kind of peaks right around the time that these men are going up for tenure around year seven or eight.
And then it's fairly stable after that so there's there's no catch up after tenure essentially.
For women, we don't see the same thing. For women, if anything, the point estimates are negative although they're pretty small and noisy.
There is no evidence right that this is helping them publish better, and if we look at all publications
there is no effects for men, but women actually the point estimates get a little bit bigger and again
they're not significant, but it does suggest maybe there's some small negative productivity effect for women.
If you take these point estimates at their face value, again
they're not significant, but by the time they go up for tenure
they have, on average, one less non top five publication than
in the absence of the policies. <Question> Does that affect on men also
suggested that if we were to move say
standard for tenure from seven year to nine or ten years, we would gain actually
one top publication for a person from just that policy?
Yeah, potentially. I mean so I think you need to think about whether or not there'd be broader distributional consequences in the profession as
a whole.
But to the extent that you know there's some
random
component of...
We were under shooting from the top
early on and either more emphasis on that, or maybe just making time longer.
I think the thing here is that you know you know you need to have papers
accepted by the time you go up for tenure. You know it's gonna take a long time to go through the initial
referee process, even if you get an R&R it can take years of revisions and
so at some point you're gonna have to take a gamble. You're gonna say am I going to try again and send it to
my second or third top five journal? Or am I going to send it slightly below, where I know the the probability of having it accepted
by the time I go up for tenure is higher? And as I remove that time constraint, especially in economics where this publication process is
particularly long, I
think there's reasons to think that you would expect this to happen more broadly.
<Comment> I'm not suggesting that you should necessarily do this,
but I think it'd be so interesting to see a similar study in a field that it doesn't take 2.5 years to get things
published. Yeah. If that's what's driving a lot of the strategic response, you get things accepted
in say 2 months or 3 months. Like in Sciences.
I mean they're different issues there with funding and lab space, but it is...
Okay, just very briefly here's some descriptive evidence on fertility to get a fertility information
we did a survey. We surveyed everyone in our sample for whom we could find a valid email address. Some of you responded.
We have a really high response rate. We had a 65 percent response rate, but it's highly selective.
Interpret this as descriptive.
But we do see evidence. These are just means here, and then differences it means,
but
the probability of having any birth before tenure goes up pretty substantially when clock stopping is available for men.
The difference in the point estimates is quite similar for women actually. It's not a statistically significant difference, but again
these are pretty small samples.
For women the number of births also goes up.
And then the last two rows show the probability of ever having a child
so at any point, and then the total number of children, and we don't see differences.
This is just really an instance of margin effect right. People are shifting the timing of their fertility. They're not having additional kids that they didn't want or wouldn't have wanted.
Okay so very briefly to conclude,
we find in this paper that these gender-neutral clock stopping policies have pretty substantial unintended consequences for women,
leading them to be substantially less likely to earn tenure in their first jobs, although
we don't find evidence that they leave academia altogether.
These results are driven by
increases in male publishing to some extent and are consistent with the idea that these policies may be pushing up the tenure bar.
We're not seeing you know huge negative effects on female productivity that would be consistent with these lower tenure rates.
So to address Anne's point, I think you know that what we need to think about going forward here is that
Economics may just be fundamentally different than other fields.
The publishing process is very long.
There's a really high return to top journals that we don't see to the same extent other fields.
We don't for the most part do postdocs. We don't have labs.
we don't have many many co-authors right? Economics is just different for a lot of reasons, and so I think from a policy perspective, as
universities are considering whether these policies are good or bad,
right or wrong, or we need future changes,
it's important to consider that you know these results may be specific to Economics. And we do need more
research to know whether or not this would be true in the lab based sciences or in
disciplines where you publish books to get tenure instead of journal articles, etc.
I think there's reasons to think that you know
if you think that in many fields people are time constrained in the tenure process,
you would expect to see similar results.
Again, though I do think some of the big magnitude here may be driven by the specifics in economics.
And hopefully at some point we'll have more evidence from different fields,
to see just whether or not this is true. The other thing
I wanted to mention is that in terms of thinking about whether we should get rid of these policies, it's important to
mention that the female-only policies, at least in Economics, didn't work. And one of the reasons anecdotally they didn't seem to work,
not just in Economics, but across all disciplines is that
women reported being told explicitly by their male colleagues and their department chairs not to use the policies for fear of retribution...
For fear that they would actually be punished for taking advantage of these female specific policies.
And so that's important to keep in mind not just in academia
but in in the broader context of the labor market,
one of the advantages of these gender-neutral
policies is it gets rid of some of the social stigmas against use and that potentially is a valuable thing,
in and of itself, if we can get rid of some of these negative
distributional consequences.
Okay, so I'm out of time so I'll stop there.
We do have evidence from a select number of schools including the UC system across disciplines, that take up did increase
when these policies became gender-neutral, an increase among women.
In the UC is one example where they initially had a policy that only applied to women, and then they switched so you have this
have this nice experiment where actually take up increased.
And you see the same thing actually outside of academia with family leave type
policies. When they're gender-neutral, you just see higher take up across the board and
part of the logic behind that is potentially that there is less room for
firms, for example, to statistically discriminate against women, when men also use the policies.
Now you know to the extent we think that
men are still going to work while using these things or women are still more likely than men to take leave, etc.
I think it's a little bit...specific
as to how people are actually evaluated, but in terms of being comfortable with take up, I think there is a clear advantage
to not limiting.
One thing actually that I think is quite interesting that
Harvard recently implemented is
a policy that
couples together a couple different types of family leave policies.
So they still have a gender-neutral tenure clock policy, where everyone can take that short time on their tenure clock,
but only birth parents only birth mothers
can take course release or get additional course release or something like that. So they're trying to couple together different types of benefits
so you're essentially making up for the fact that yeah, maybe childbirth is still costly for women,
but we don't want to completely gender the benefits to the point where there's you know...
Unfortunately these are new enough that they haven't really been evaluated.
That might be really interesting. So we could theoretically match couples in our data that we know that
either have the same last name or we just know about.
Our sample's not that big. There just aren't enough of them to really I think do anything that's statistically meaningful.
But if you had data on more disciplines, I think you could do that. I think it would be really interesting.
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