The research, conducted by Mila Sherman, professor of finance in the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Heather Tookes, professor of finance at the Yale School of Management, was published recently in the Journal of Finance. It is the first paper the journal has ever published on gender imbalance in academia.
Sherman and Tookes did a review of finance faculty from the top 100 business schools in the U.S. from 2009 to 2017 and it revealed that just 16% of the faculty members were women. After controlling their data for productivity, they found that women tend to work for lower-ranked institutions and were less likely to be tenured than men. The analysis showed that less than 15% of the population of tenured finance faculty are female in every year of the sample.
While the gender gap has shrunk in recent years, Sherman notes that the progress made is in jeopardy. There is now evidence, she says, that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a bigger negative impact on female faculty and their research productivity.
Sherman and Tookes also obtained salary data from 37 of the 60 public institutions in their sample. In a comparison of wages, there is a gender gap of 3.7%. The data showed a more significant gap in the earlier years of the sample, but by 2015, it had disappeared. However, Sherman notes, the largest pay gaps occurred in 2011 and 2012, just as many colleges and universities began to recover from the financial crisis a few years earlier. The authors suggest that post-financial crisis wage adjustments were faster for men than women. Overall, they note, the gender pay gap in academic finance is much smaller than in the overall U.S. economy.
The research showed that among finance faculty, women publish less than men, with a publication gap of 17.3%. Women also tend to have more female co-authors, suggesting that a smaller publication network exists for female faculty. Even though women publish less, they are more likely to have successful collaborations with other women, Sherman noted, adding that if the first author on a finance paper is a woman, the paper is more likely to have another female co-author.
