"From 2009 through 2017, women made up an average of 16 percent of finance professors in 100 top business schools,” observes Isenberg Professor of Finance Mila Getmansky Sherman.
“And this ratio has been persistent throughout the sample.” Sherman is a coauthor with Professor Heather Tookes of Yale’s School of Management of “Female Representation in the Academic Finance Profession,” which will be published by the prestigious Journal of Finance. Their research also reveals that, after controlling for research productivity, a disproportionate number of women have positions at lower-ranked institutions and are less likely to be full professors. In the early years of the survey, moreover, women had lower tenure rates than men. And a pay gap also favored men.
Women also published fewer papers than their male counterparts—an indication of research quantity, not quality, note the authors. The quantity gap, they contend, is mainly driven by publications, especially coauthored ones, that don’t make it into top journals. On the other hand, Sherman and Tookes found no significant difference between men’s and women’s number of solo contributions to top publications.
The news, in fact, isn’t all gloom and doom. In the final years of the sample , the ratios of female to male faculty members began to move northward, notes Sherman. “In the last years of our sample, the evidence that women are at lower-ranked schools and are less likely to have tenure, and receive lower wages, disappears,” the coauthors observe. Among faculty with tenure during the study period of 2009 through 2017, 9.7 percent were women. But women accounted for 24.3 percent of faculty who obtained tenure during those years. And over the same period, women comprised 20.4 percent of rookie new hires.
Data Deep Dive
“Professor Tookes and I are both tenured full professors. We didn’t need to do this research,” Sherman observes. “But there were no such studies in our discipline. Ours is the first. We’ve spent our careers in a profession dominated by males and wanted to share our findings for everyone’s benefit,” she continues. “In documenting gender gaps in placement, publications, and salary, our research mirrors similar studies in economics and in the STEM disciplines. Our study, then, offers further evidence that such gender gaps appear to be systematic across disciplines.
“The journal’s editor, in fact, invited us to submit our work and findings,” Sherman recalls. Publication of the paper, however, was never a cakewalk. “It went through three rounds and took two years before it got accepted. We began with UMass data from the campus’s central administration. We then contacted the data provider Academic Analytics for data on other universities. That information had always been available, but no one had thought to use it. There was little interest and incentives for such a project. In contrast, we were passionate about it and wanted to serve the profession.
“Cleaning the data was extremely labor intensive,” she adds. “We wanted to make sure to get it right and serve as a starting point for research on career outcomes in the finance profession. Upon publication, we will provide the cleaned data for academics to use and to continue this important research.”
Isenberg Initiatives
Sherman is proud of Isenberg’s own initiatives on behalf of women—students and academics alike. The school, she emphasizes, rewards women academics with chaired positions, pursues “special pathway hires” for female talent, and encourages faculty and professional mentorships. (Sherman is herself a mentor to Assistant Professor of Finance Wenting Ma.) At the same time, Isenberg empowers students with leadership experience, insights from professionals, and networking through organizations like Smart Woman Securities and Women of Isenberg.
Where do we go from here? Mentorship programs might help reduce the publications gap, the authors observe. To that end, they cite research where workshops with senior and junior female economists increased publication rates in top journals by 25 percent. A second challenge is to grow networks that narrow the gap. Women in finance, write Sherman and Tookes, have significantly smaller coauthor networks and are more likely to publish with other women. Combining those factors with their 16 percent representation on finance faculties suggests smaller publication networks. In the end, though, Sherman and Tookes offer no panaceas. Instead, they consider their paper a contribution for future progress:
Female representation can be limited by bias. It can also be limited by conditions that do not allow female scholars to thrive (for example, limited networks). We do not take a stand on which of these factors drive many of the differences that we observe, but we hope that the basic facts in this paper will encourage future work to reduce gender gaps in the profession.
