Requirement That Women Constitute 40% Of Faculty Search Committees Resulted In 38% Reduction In Female Hires

Inside Higher Ed, Male Backlash Blamed for Failure of French Effort on Hiring Female Academics:

The introduction of quotas to get more women onto university recruitment committees in France has backfired and has actually led to far fewer female academics being hired, new research has revealed.

A male backlash against the equity measures is the most likely reason for the decline in female recruitment, according to analysis by Pierre Deschamps, an economist at Sciences Po, in Paris [Gender Quotas in Hiring Committees: A Boon or a Bane for Women?].

He investigated recruitment data from 455 hiring committees across three French universities in the years before and after the introduction of the requirement for recruitment committees to draw at least 40 percent of their membership from each gender.

’ modeling indicates that, had the quotas not been introduced, 38 percent more women would have been hired. “That’s enormous,” he said.

Nor have the quotas yet encouraged any more women to apply for positions, according to “Gender Quotas in Hiring Committees: A Boon or a Bane for Women?” a working paper from Sciences Po’s Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Evaluation of Public Policies.