Professor Heather Antecol, former Director of the Berger Institute, was featured last week in The New York Times. A study she co-authored with two other professors shows that gender-neutral tenure extension policies put women at a disadvantage:

The policies led to a 19 percentage-point rise in the probability that a male economist would earn tenure at his first job. In contrast, women’s chances of gaining tenure fell by 22 percentage points. Before the arrival of tenure extension, a little less than 3o percent of both women and men at these institutions gained tenure at their first jobs. The decline for women is therefore very large. It suggests that the new policies made it extraordinarily rare for female economists to clear the tenure hurdle.