  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.
