Fertility and Promotions: Academic Careers of Economists over 40 Years in Denmark

The arrival of children often takes place early in the research career. For many researchers, the life-changing and demanding event of becoming a parent overlap with the period the researcher has to show high levels of research productivity with the aim of gaining tenure, or an equivalent promotion to a professorship. It is important to understand how having children contributes to the 'the leaky pipeline' of women and which factors mitigate or exacerbate gender gaps in attrition following parenthood. Our project asks how fertility decisions, and specifically their timing, can affect women's academic careers in Economics. We will study this question with administrative data from Denmark covering the uni-linked with high-quality bibliometric data from Scopus. To understand how the arrival of children affects productivity and how this maps on women's probability to successful career in academia, we first estimate the unconditional child penalty of women and men economists on career progression (i.e. attrition and promotion). We then move on to estimate the child penalty of women and men economists on productivity outcomes, namely number of publications and quality of publications. While being aware that productivity is endogenous to fertility, we will estimate whether the child penalty in career progression persists once family outcomes will allow us to compare whether the child penalty caries across insights into how the timing of children interacts with the pressure on early career productivity and what extent this disadvantages women. Finally, we will explore under which circumstances gender gaps are mitigates and focus on two channels: first, the current position held by the researcher and the structure of promotion and characteristics of their workplace and second, the individual circumstances depending on their partners' career path.