The Patriarchy at Work

Many studies have shown that women are
under-represented in tenured ranks in the sciences. We evaluate
whether gender differences in the likelihood of obtaining a
tenure track job, promotion to tenure, and promotion to full
professor explain these facts using the 1973-2001 Survey of
Doctorate Recipients. We find that women are less likely to take
tenure track positions in science, but the gender gap is entirely
explained by fertility decisions. We find that in science
overall, there is no gender difference in promotion to tenure or
full professor after controlling for demographic, family,
employer and productivity covariates and that in many cases,
there is no gender difference in promotion to tenure or full
professor even without controlling for covariates. However,
family characteristics have different impacts on women’s and
men’s promotion probabilities. Single women do better at each
stage than single men, although this might be due to selection.
Children make it less likely that women in science will advance
up the academic job ladder beyond their early post-doctorate
years, while both marriage and children increase men’s likelihood
of advancing.

From "Does Science Promote Women? Evidence from Academia 1973-2001".

Addendum: Tyler linked to an earlier version of this paper but if I forgot then probably so did you so here it is again.