Focusing on the promotion system for French academics, the authors aim at understanding the causes behind the underrepresentation of women among the highest positions. Three potential explanations are tested: gender discrimination, self-selection of women into competition, and poorer performance of women in contests conditional on applying for promotion. A rich database including information on candidates, those eligible to be candidates and the results of competitive examinations is used. They find that women have a lower probability to be candidates. It remains to understand why women tend to participate less than men in contests.