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This paper contributes to the existing literature on the gender gap in academic career advancement by focusing on the very early stage of the academic career, i.e. the transition from Ph.D. completion to a tenured position.

Using Italian individual-level data, our econometric analyses estimate the likelihood of holding a tenured position conditional on a set of individual-level covariates.

Our findings support the idea that women have a lower probability of obtaining a tenured position. Results hold even when research productivity and experience are controlled for.

Our conclusions suggest that there is a significant gender gap in progression through an academic career.

This paper contributes to the empirical analysis of PhD holders' transition into the non-academic labor market (i.e. their intersectoral mobility). The research focuses on doctoral graduates specialized in a field of study supposed to have notable non-academic applications, namely Industrial and Information Engineering. We inspect whether these doctoral graduates experience lower satisfaction with PhD knowledge use on the job when they work outside universities and non-public research centers.

We use cross-sectional survey data collected by the Italian National Institute of Statistics in 2014. Ordinary least squares and ordered logit analyses provide baseline results; furthermore, we apply a multinomial endogenous treatment model to control for potential bias arising from self-selection into employment sectors.

We find evidence that for PhD holders Industrial and Information Engineering being employed in the industrial and services sector implies lower satisfaction with the use of doctoral knowledge than that reported by their counterparts working in universities or public research centers.

These results complement and extend previous evidence about PhD holders' career outcomes by focusing on the intersectoral mobility issue and on a specific group of doctoral graduates whose intersectoral mobility potential is expected to be high. Our findings call for policies that might trigger a better alignment between doctoral education and non-academic jobs.