Title: When Time Windows Widen: Gendered Career Trajectories and Unintended Competition in China’s Science Funding Reforms

Speaker: Xuan Jiang. Her research interests are labor economics and education economics, currently focusing mainly on the determinants of human capital accumulation. Her existing research has been published in international journals such as Labour Economics, Demography, Plos One, China Economic Review, and Contemporary Economic Policy. She has served as an anonymous referee for journals including the Quarterly Journal of Economics and American Economic Journal: Applied Economics.

Abstract: Female scientists persistently face structural barriers in academia, where existing family-support policies (e.g., tenure clock extensions) often fail to mitigate career penalties tied to motherhood, inadvertently exacerbating gender disparities in competitive environments. We analyze a novel preemptive policy intervention—China’s 2011 reform extending the National Natural Science Foundation’s Young Scientist Grant (YSG) eligibility window for women from age 35 to 40. Unlike post-birth accommodations, this reform proactively addresses the temporal overlap between fertility windows and career-critical periods. Leveraging a quasi-experimental design using Difference-in-Differences-Differences approaches, we find the policy initially increased YSG success rates for eligible women. However, long-term career gains were limited, and unintended spillovers emerged: younger male scholars accelerated grant-seeking in competitive fields, crowding out female peers’ access to resources while intensifying gender gaps in leadership roles (evidenced by women’s shift toward first-authored publications). Our findings reveal the dual-edged nature of gender-targeted temporal compensation and underscore the need to model competitive feedback loops in designing equity policies for knowledge economies.

Date & time: 24 March 2025, 10:00 - 11:30

Venue: B336, Zhixin Building, Central Campus, Shandong University