The literature on the theme of gender differences in research performance indicates a quite evident gap in favor of men over women. Beyond the understanding of the factors that could be at the basis of this phenomenon, it is worthwhile understanding if it would be appropriate to conduct the evaluation per population in a manner distinguished by gender. In fact if there is some factor that structurally determines a penalization of performance by women researchers compared to men then the comparative evaluation of organizations' performance that does not take gender into account will lead to an advantage for those that employ more men, under parity in the capacities of their staffs. In this work we measure the differences of the performance and the rank of research institutions as observed when gender is taken into account compared to when it is ignored. The study population consists of all Italian universities and the performance measured in the hard sciences for the period 2006-2010.
The representation of women in research systems varies across countries, institutions and disciplines. However the fact of their underrepresentation is undeniable. Only four (Portugal, Estonia, Slovak Republic and Iceland) of 28 OECD nations whose data are available show a percentage of women greater than 40%, with a maximum of 46% 1 .This phenomenon is underlain by a mix of different factors, with different weights across countries: educational emancipation has come later for women, with consequent lesser numbers of potential candidates for academic positions; lesser interest among women for research activity; the scientific production of women tends to be lower than that for men, perhaps due to the social roles of women as wives and mothers, or from causes of gender discrimination; gender discrimination can also occur in recruitment processes. One way to reduce the underrepresentation of women in the research system is to control for factors exogenous to scientific merit in all processes of comparative performance evaluation, in order to avoid incorrect conclusions and choices that are harmful to women and to institutions with greater female representation in their research staffs. In this regard it is important to note that the so-called "productivity gap" in favor of men is a documented fact. The lesser research performance of females has been established in tens of studies of diverse countries and disciplines 2,3,4,5,6 , although it is lessening over time 7,8,9,10,11,12 and it is more visible in the early stages of career 13 , and among top scientists 14,15 . Looking at productivity as indicated by patenting, women faculty members produce at about 40% of the rate of men 16 .
There is an equally substantial literature investigating the possible causes of the productivity gap, particularly the issues of the environmental and personal factors that can influence the researcher’s performance, beyond the personal merit of the individual 17 . Rossiter 18 indicates the particular case of the so-called “Matilda effect”, which occurs when female scientists are not recognized in the bylines of the publications resulting from joint research. A separate concern is that in the career recruitment stages the percentages of female applicants who are successful in selection procedures is generally lower 19 . In the subsequent stages of entry to the academic environment females generally evaluate their mentors as less satisfactory than do their male colleagues 20 . However there is also no doubt that the changing personal conditions that the researchers experience over time also affect their productivity. In the late postdoctoral and early faculty years many qualified women scientists stop applying for NIH grants 21 . During their careers, women present lower productivity in the intermediate levels of seniority 22 . In this phase the characteristics of marriage and the presence of school-age children have negative effects on research productivity 23,24,25 . It has been demonstrated that research collaborations have a positive correlation with scientific performance 26 and particularly international collaborations 27 , but also that women register less international collaborations than men 28 , possibly for reasons of women avoiding longer stays at a distance from their families. Women tend to have more restricted collaboration networks 29,30,31 particularly in the first years of their career 32,33 , which limits their access to the resources and assets necessary for their research activity. Duch et al. 34 observe that academic research institutions tend not support women with adequate financial resources, particularly in the hard sciences. According to Ceci and Williams 35 differential gender outcomes result exclusively from differences in resources.
However the aim of the current work is not to investigate further into the issues of if or to what extent there is gender discrimination in the research sphere, or into the objective limitations on women due to their social roles. Rather we wish to determine if the separation of the measurement of research performance by gender produces detectably different results from measurement without gender distinction. In contexts where the potential of discrimination by gender is recognized, or where the family roles of women can condition the time, energy or personal concentration devoted to research, the conduct of comparative evaluation without distinction by gender would inevitably penalize the research organizations that employ a research staff with higher concentration of women. The results of the analysis are thus of certain interest in all processes of comparative evaluation of institutions, such as for example national research assessment exercises, especially where these are intended for the efficient allocation of the available resources. The policy maker can then decide whether the extent of rank differences suggests for gender distinction when conducting institutions'
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