Gender inequalities in higher education and research.

Summary In their policy brief entitled "Why do women hold fewer positions of responsibility? Une analyse des promotions universitaires en économie 1" (Why do women occupy fewer positions of responsibility?), Clément Bosquet, Pierre-Philippe Combes, and Cecilia Garcia-Peñalosa make an important contribution to the analysis of gender inequalities in higher education and research in France, based on the conclusions of a working paper recently published by LIEPP (Bosquet, Combes, & Garcia Penalosa, 2014). From a methodological point of view, the two major advantages of their approach lie in the volume and quality of the database used and in the integration of a measure of the scientific production of the candidates in the analysis of promotions. This discussion returns to the interest of the results of the exploitation of these data and to the proposed explanations, before proposing a broadening of the questioning based on a problematization of the concept of gender. Indeed, while the authors tend to reduce it to a descriptive characteristic of individuals, the sociological analysis of gender as a social system allows us to question the institutional forces behind the inequalities observed.