Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E S Teaching Accreditation Exams Reveal Grading Biases 2Why are women underrepresented in most areas of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)? One of the most common explanations is that a hiring bias against women exists in those fields (1-4). This explanation is supported by a few older experiments (5-7), a recent one with fictitious resumes (8), and a recent lab experiment (9), suggesting that the phenomenon still prevails.However some scholars have challenged this view (10, 11) and another recent experiment with fictitious resumes finds a bias in favor of women in academic recruitment (12). Studies based on actual hiring also find that when women apply to tenure-track STEM positions, they are more likely to be hired (13-18). However, those studies do not control for applicants' quality and a frequent claim is that their results simply reflect that only the best female PhDs apply to these positions while a larger fraction of males do so (11,13). A study by one of us did partly control for applicants' quality and reported a bias in favor of women in maledominated fields (19). However, it has limited external validity since it only relies on 3,000 candidates at the French Ecole Normale Supérieure entrance exam.The present analysis is based on a natural experiment over 100,000 individuals who participate in competitive exams used to hire French primary, secondary and college/university teachers over the period 2006-2013. It has two distinct advantages over all previous studies. First, it provides large-scale real-world evidence on gender biases in evaluation-based hiring in several fields. Second, it shows that those biases against or in favor of women are strongly shaped by the actual degree of female under-representation in the field in which the evaluation takes place, partly reconciling existing studies.Carefully taking into account the extent of under-representation of women in 11 academic fields allows us to extend the analysis beyond the STEM distinction. As pointed out recently (11)(12)(19)(20), the focus on STEM versus non STEM fields can be misleading to understand female underrepresentation in academia as some STEM fields are not dominated by men (e.g. 54% of U.S. Ph.Ds. in molecular biology are women (21)) while some non-STEM fields, including humanities, are male-dominated (e.g. only 31% of U.S. PhDs. in philosophy are women (21)). A better pre...

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