In most cases, doctoral graduates leave universities some years after graduation. How much do doctoral graduates earn when they leave university? Do postdoc years monetary pay off outside academia? In a recent paper, Johannes König shows that postdoctoral time does not result in wage premiums but is associated with wage losses outside academia. Moreover, the later doctoral graduates leave academia, the less they earn in the private sector (in the first five years after graduation). The wage gap is sizable and rapidly grows with postdoc time (see Fig 1). The first postdoc year is associated with a wage loss of 5% compared to no postdoc experience. Leaving five years after graduation is associated with a wage loss of 18%.

Johannes finds this pattern in the labor market, analyzing more than 33 000 observations within an extensive 15 years timeframe (graduates between 1994 and 2009). This pattern holds on the five largest subject fields: humanities and arts, social sciences, science and mathematics, medicine, and engineering.  Moreover, these findings "can be considered representative of doctorate recipients who were employed as postdocs at universities for up to 5 years after graduation and later changed the employment sector".
 
Naturally, the question arises if selection plays a role: Perhaps, the most productive, ambitious postdocs stay in academia, while others leave with no wage premium or loss. Apart from including a set of control variables that can account for the difference between doctoral graduates, Johannes uses a matching approach that shall partially reduce this concern. He matches statistically comparable doctoral graduates on observable characteristics, e.g., age,  citizenship, previous work experience, and compares the wages among them. Yet, the pattern remains unchanged after this procedure suggesting the robustness of the observed wage gap.
 
These results beg the question if one can consider the postdoctoral period as a further qualification used to justify a postdoc's relatively insecure working conditions. Why is the payoff so low if the postdoctoral period is deemed the advanced qualification phase?
 
Read more:
König, J., 2022. Postdoctoral employment and future non-academic career prospects. Plos one, 17(12), p.e0278091.
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​Being interested in the gender gap in the labor market,  we (Maria Mavlikeeva and I) were intrigued by the somewhat counterintuitive observation in the literature and the result of our meta-analysis of correspondence studies: On average, women are more likely to be invited for job interviews than men (see Fig. 1). This result is at odds with the overall gender gap in the labor market, which favors men.

​To explain this counterintuitive result, we developed a hypothesis based on group identity theory: As recruiters may favor applicants of their gender, the predominance of female recruiters is responsible for a higher rate of women being invited for job interviews than men. We used data from our large-scale correspondence study to test this hypothesis. In this correspondence study, we randomly varied the gender of the applicant (male or female applicant name) on the resumes sent in response to real job openings; then, we measured the rate of callbacks for interviews. 
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​​As expected, we found that female applicants were more likely to receive callbacks for interviews. We also observed that the majority of the contact persons responsible for the recruitment process in our sample were female. But perhaps most importantly, we found that if the recruiter and applicant were of the same gender, the probability of the applicant being invited for an interview increased (see Fig. 2).  These findings suggest gender-based in-group favoritism in the recruitment process.

The evidence of in-group favoritism in the recruitment process offers a promising avenue for addressing gender-based hiring discrimination. Ensuring that recruiters' positions at various levels are equally appealing to all genders can help to decrease gender-based bias during the selection stage of the recruitment process for other applicants. Moreover, incorporating discussions of in-group bias, regardless of gender, in diversity training could be beneficial to equalize employment opportunities.

Read more...

Asanov, I., & Mavlikeeva, M. (2023). Can group identity explain the gender gap in the recruitment process? Industrial Relations Journal, 54, 95-113. https://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12392