  In a recent article, I showed that in several academic disciplines in Italy,
professors display a paucity of last names that cannot be explained by
unbiased, random, hiring processes. I suggested that this scarcity of last
names could be related to the prevalence of nepotistic hires, i.e., professors
engaging in illegal practices to have their relatives hired as academics. My
findings have recently been questioned through repeat analysis to the United
Kingdom university system. Ferlazzo & Sdoia found that several disciplines in
this system also display a scarcity of last names, and that a similar scarcity
is found when analyzing the first (given) names of Italian professors. Here I
show that the scarcity of first names in Italian disciplines is completely
explained by uneven male/female representation, while the scarcity of last
names in United Kingdom academia is due to discipline-specific immigration.
However, these factors cannot explain the scarcity of last names in Italian
disciplines. Geographic and demographic considerations -- proposed as a
possible explanation of my findings -- appear to have no significant effect:
after correcting for these factors, the scarcity of last names remains highly
significant in several disciplines, and there is a marked trend from north to
south, with a higher likelihood of nepotism in the south and in Sicily.
Moreover, I show that in several Italian disciplines positions tend to be
inherited as with last names (i.e., from father to son, but not from mother to
daughter). Taken together, these results strenghten the case for nepotism,
highlighting that statistical tests cannot be applied to a dataset without
carefully considering the characteristics of the data and critically
interpreting the results.
