Is it just a memory from the past? An analysis of the gender productivity gap of Italian academics in 2015-2016

This chapter investigates the gender productivity gap in Italian universities, in order to provide a picture of women's disadvantages in academic career advancement before the Covid-19 pandemic crisis. Survey data from a national study on Italian academics carried out between the end of 2015 and the beginning of 2016 were used. The data allowed us to observe the relationship between gender and scientific productivity in a large representative sample of academics (N=5.123) from all disciplinary fields, providing insight on the production of two types of scientific publications: monographies (1), and journal articles and chapters in edited volumes (2). Moreover, the data allowed us to examine the gender productivity gap focusing on the generational issue, assuming that this gap narrows among younger researchers, as various scholars in other national contexts underlined. Results show that the gender productivity gap persists in the Italian Academia, albeit with specific differences in the type of scientific product and the disciplinary field: it is significant in SSH for both books (1) and articles and chapters (2), but the gap concerns only the second type of publication (2) in STEM. Moreover, in STEM disciplines younger women and men are equally productive, whereas in SSH younger women continue to publish fewer articles than younger men. Different explanatory hypotheses from the literature are proposed for these results, taking into account gender bias and the neoliberal turn in the academic organisational culture.