When is so much enough? On the presence of women in Italian universities and their participation in funded research projects and publications

In the last decade, several actions have been undertaken by different institutions to promote women’s careers in academia and increase female representation through gender equality programmes and action plans. The share of female students graduating from universities now exceeds that of male students, and the share of women pursuing an academic career is slowly increasing. Despite the larger influx of female students and junior academics, relevant statistics continue to indicate a so-called scissor effect between the genders that persists through different cohorts of men and women. Even in disciplines where women have been overrepresented among PhDs and at early career stages for many years. There is reason to believe that stereotypes about women in science persist and impede their career progress. Continuing indications of sexism and gender bias in academia suggest that the QB phenomenon may still be present today. This may lead to the provocative conclusion that recent measures intended to prevent biases against women may help perpetuate them. Specifically, involving senior female scientists in supervision and review procedures may harm rather than help the cause it is intended to serve, as there are chances that this eventually results in the provision of less rather than more encouragement and opportunities to young female scientists. This, in turn, may discourage women’s participation in research projects as well. Nonetheless, to better understand the Queen Bee syndrome, it would be useful to distinguish between disciplines and academic ranks. Women’s behaviour may be thus related to the scientific area where they operate and whether they climb the ladder. We aim to perform these further analyses in the near future. Similarly, venues for future research may be tackling the limitations of the data considering the inhomogeneous availability of data on the PRIN calls, the availability of publication gender data averaged over a 5-years time window and for a limited number of Italian universities in the Leiden Rankings