Miscellaneous
What else might work to increase the share of women in academia? The papers presented here focus on different topics - and simply did not fit into any other category:
Does a gender-neutral tenure clock help women? The answer is no, instead, it helps male researchers. But, a tenure clock stopping only for women helps women.
Does a higher share of women in scientific committees promoting professors help to increase the share of women? It did not help, it even sometimes had the opposite effect.
Hiring a chief diversity officer does not have an impact on the diversity of the faculty.
Gender quotas, on the other hand, helped in a laboratory experiment to increase the share of high-performing women to compete (and thus maybe strive for more competitive professional roles). In total, the gains through more high-performing women competing outweigh the losses of high-performing men choosing not to compete anymore.
Gender quatas do not seem to have a negative impact of performance evaluations of women.
More women in "selectorates,” i.e., amongthose who select an organization’s leader only helps when it is complemented by a change in organizational culture.
Thinking consciously about what topics to focus on in an academic policy journal and trying hard to actively commission papers of female authors seemed to have helped to increase the number of female authors in an economic journal.
A rather descriptive paper shows that some academic conferences managed to increase the share of female-speaker in the last years applying different measures to achieve this goal.
Furthermore, to reduce the gender gap in negotiations and therefore in the long term the gender-wage gap, it might help to clearly state that wage negotiations are possible during the hiring process.
Does double-blind peer review increase the number of female authors compared to single-blind papers? For papers published in the field of behavioral ecology, the number of female authors was not higher in the double-blind compare to the single-blind journals.
People are less likely to choose candidates whose gender would increase group diversity when making personnel selections in isolation (i.e., when they are responsible for selecting a single group member) than when making collections of choices (i.e., when they are responsible for selecting multiple group members).
Significant doubt on the idea that token women can solve influence gaps by “leaning in” is raised in a paper on token women in teams. These token women are seen as less influential by their peers and are less likely to be chosen to represent the group than women on majority-women teams.
Froming student groups in which women are the minority resulted in an increased chance that those students leaving the field.
Outside of academia (military) it was shown that women in a team could change attitudes about mixed-gender productivity, gender roles and gender identity.
With more female peers in teaching sections at a business school female students become less likely to choose male-dominated majors like finance and more likely to choose female-dominated majors like marketing.
Another study indicates that generous formal family-leave policies, on-site childcare, and spousal hiring policies differently affect the productivity of women and men academic scientists: For women, leave policies are related to increased journal publications and maintenance of teaching loads, whereas for men, leave policies are reducing teaching loads. Formal policies related to delaying the tenure clock, however, are not significantly related to productivity.
Evidence suggests that ‘fix-the-institution’ initiatives are more effective in reducing gender differences in negotiation outcomes. Concerns of adverse effects of banning negotiations or salary history requests have not materialized, and preliminary evidence points to reductions in the gender differences in negotiation outcomes.
There are indications that there is a gender gap being selected as a Fellow of the Econometric Society. The authors of the paper analyzing several of the channels that may mediate the gender gap in peer recognition, including visibility, networking, and credit for coauthored work.
Using gendered language might reduce the gender bias.
Antecol, H., Bedard, K., & Stearns, J. (2018). Equal but Inequitable: Who Benefits from Gender-Neutral Tenure Clock Stopping Policies?. American Economic Review, 108(9), 2420-41.
U.S. dataset of economic assistant professor hires (n= 1,392) at top-50 economics departments from 1980–2005. The paper shows that the adoption of gender-neutral tenure clock stopping policies substantially reduced female tenure rates while substantially increasing male tenure rates.
Many skilled professional occupations are characterized by an early period of intensive skill accumulation and career establishment. High female exit rates are sometimes blamed on the inability of new mothers to survive the sustained negative productivity shock associated with childbearing and early child-rearing in these environments. Gender-neutral family policies have been adopted in some professions in an attempt to “level the playing field.” The gender-neutral tenure clock stopping policies adopted by the majority of research-intensive universities in the United States in recent decades are an excellent example. The authors find that men are 17 percentage points more likely to get tenure in their first job once there is an established gender-neutral clock stopping policy in place, while women are 19 percentage points less likely. These policies substantially increase the gender gap in tenure rates. The primary mechanism driving these effects is an increase in the number of top-5 journal publications by men with no such increase by women. However, this does not mean that more women leave academia. Among those who start their career at a top-50 department, the authors find no evidence that gender-neutral clock stopping policies reduce the share of women who ultimately get tenure in the profession.
Furthermore, the paper finds no consistent evidence that women are either hurt or helped by clock stopping policies that only apply to women.
Romer, D. & Wolfers, J. (2018). Countering Gender Bias and Improving Gender Balance - Lessons from Our Experience at Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. CSWEP news 2018(3), 7-9.
An informal experiment of two editors of a policy-related conference series (Brookings Papers on Economic Activity); most papers are commissioned or solicited by the editors in this journal. At the beginning of their tenure, the two editors agreed that they were concerned about the lack of gender diversity in economics and that they would strive to make Brookings Papers part of the solution rather than part of the problem. They informally assessed hat works and what didn't to increase the share of women, which resulted in a higher share of female authors compared to similar journals in that period.
What did not work: Disorganized editors had negative consequences for gender equity. When trying to find a last-minute discussant or author, the editors tended to go with the first names that came to mind or to turn to people with whom they had personal connections. Unfortunately, those people were generally men. Good governance practices had no effect on gender equity, either. Posting an open call for paper proposals was an easily accessible way for anyone to submit a paper proposal without any solicitation. There was no tendency for those proposals to come disproportionately from women (or from other underrepresented groups). Engaging “superstar” female economists had also little effect on gender equity. Some of the most important papers published during the editors' tenure came through that channel. But those authors have many other excellent opportunities, and it would have been incompetence of the editors not to approach such economists, regardless of gender. Thus it was hardly a major contribution to breaking down gender barriers.
What worked: Making an explicit decision to be concerned about these issues and to think consciously about them had the biggest impact on gender equity. The authors state that simply trying to be gender-blind is insufficient. Having decided to be proactive, avoiding to make snap decisions or to presume that the “obvious” names were the best ones. Even thinking earlier at the stage of gender equality when choosing subjects for papers had a positive impact. Thinking broadly about topics and trying to ensure that it included work from those sub-fields where women are less underrepresented led to a more diverse set of topics and a more diverse set of participants. Having some minimal numerical guidelines was helpful. Avoiding an all-male author line up was the first step but furthermore viewing the numerical guidelines as floors, increased the number of female authors.
Natural experiment in Italy and Spain used to test how female evaluators affects committee decision-making using data on about 100,000 applications to associate and full professor, assessed by 8,000 randomly selected evaluators. The authors show that a larger number of women in evaluation committees does not increase either the quantity or the quality of female candidates who qualify. Information from individual voting reports suggests that female evaluators are not significantly more favorable toward female candidates. At the same time, male evaluators become less favorable toward female candidates as soon as a female evaluator joins the committee.
In order to be either promoted or hired by a university at the level of associate or full professor, researchers are required to first obtain a qualification granted by a centralized committee at the national level in Italy and Spain. In these nationwide examinations, which are performed periodically in all disciplines in both countries, evaluators are selected from a pool of eligible professors using a random draw. This allows the researchers to consistently estimate the causal effect of committees’ gender composition on evaluations. Furthermore, the authors also observe extensive and detailed information on evaluators’ and candidates’ research production, academic connections, and their sub-field of specialization.
The paper finds no empirical support, neither from the average in the two countries nor from the majority of sub-samples analyzed, to suggest that the presence of women in evaluation committees decreases the gender gap in a statistically or economically significant way. On the contrary, in Italy, gender-mixed committees exhibit a significantly larger gender gap than committees composed only of male evaluators. An extra woman in a committee of five members increases the gender gap by somewhere between 0.4 and 3.3 percentage-points, considering a 95 percent confidence interval. In the Spanish case, the authors reject any sizable impact. An additional woman in a committee of seven members may decrease the gender gap by at most 0.5 percentage-points or it might also increase it by up to 1 percentage-points. Furthermore, the paper also examines whether committees with a relatively larger proportion of women promote better candidates, using as a proxy of candidates’ quality their research output before the evaluation and, in the case of Spain, also their research output during the following five years. The authors do not observe any significant difference in the past or future observable quality of candidates who have qualified in committees with different gender compositions.
Evidence from 300,000 individual voting reports, available in the case of Italy, suggests that there are two main factors that explain why female candidates do not benefit from a larger presence of women in committees: In mixed gender committees, female evaluators rate female applicants higher than their male colleagues, but the difference is small and statistically non-significant. At the same time, the presence of female evaluators in committees makes male evaluators tougher upon female candidates, perhaps reflecting a licensing effect or male identity priming.
US study trying to find an impact of hiring (n=462 university) a chief diversity officer on the diversity of faculty hiring. As the American college student population has become more diverse, the goal of hiring a more diverse faculty has received increased attention in higher education. A signal of institutional commitment to faculty diversity often includes the hiring of an executive level chief diversity officer (CDO). To examine the effects of a CDO in a broad panel data context, the authors combine unique data on the initial hiring of a CDO with publicly available faculty and administrator hiring data by race and ethnicity from 2001 to 2016 for four-year or higher U.S. universities categorized as Carnegie R1, R2, or M1 institutions with student populations of 4,000 or more. The authors are unable to find significant statistical evidence that preexisting growth in diversity for underrepresented racial/ethnic minority groups is affected by the hiring of an executive level diversity officer for new tenure and non-tenure track hires, faculty hired with tenure, or for university administrator hires.
Study at a Business School in the Netherlands (Panel A n= 3,563 and Panel B n=2,559). Female business graduates, however, earn less than their male counterparts. These gender differences can be traced back to university, where women shy away from majors like finance that lead to high earnings. The authors investigate how the gender composition of peers in business school affects women’s and men’s major choices and labor market outcomes. They find that women who are randomly assigned to teaching sections with more female peers become less likely to choose male-dominated majors like finance and more likely to choose female-dominated majors like marketing. After graduation, these women end up in jobs where their earnings grow more slowly. Men, on the other hand, become more likely to choose male-dominated majors and less likely to choose female-dominated majors when they had more female peers in business school. However, men’s labor market outcomes are not significantly affected. Taken together, the results show that studying with more female peers in business school increases gender segregation in educational choice and affects labor market outcomes.
Else, H. (2019) How to banish manels and manferences from scientific meetings. Nature 573, 184-186
The Nature article looks at the line-up of invited speakers at key meetings in five disciplines — neuroscience, artificial intelligence (AI), chemistry, geology and microbiology — over the past nine years. Four of the five fields seem to have made progress in diversifying the speakers at their key meetings, and in all five fields the ratio of women to men among invited speakers exceeded the overall ratio of senior women in those fields. Those with farthest to go have made the biggest gains: at the 11 machine-learning and AI meetings Nature examined, for example, the proportion of female speakers increased from 7% in 2011 to 38% in 2019. Neuroscience, geology and microbiology also show positive trends. But chemists are struggling to move the needle on diversity; across 13 chemistry conferences in the Nature analysis, the proportion of women among invited speakers rose by just one percentage point.
Good intentions are not enough, say some conference organizers. Instead, firm gender quotas or policies that compel diversity seem to reap the most success. And the effort must be repeated every year otherwise the share of female speakers deteriorated quickly again.
Laboratory experiment at a U.S. university with students (n=84) evaluating the effect of introducing a gender quota in an environment where high performing women fail to enter competitions they can win. Suboptimal entry by high-performing women can be particularly costly for firms, as reluctance to apply prevents them from hiring the best available candidates. Guaranteeing women equal representation among winners increases their entry. The response exceeds that predicted by the change in probability of winning, and is in part driven by women being more willing to compete against other women.
Of recent concern has been whether it is possible to improve the representation of women in high-profile and very competitive jobs. An explanation may be that men and women respond differently to competitive environments, with high-performing women shying away from competition. The experiment tests whether an affirmative action requirement of equal representation of women can entice more women to compete, and thereby mitigate the expected costs of such an institutional change. In the experiment, an affirmative action quota into an environment where women fail to enter competitions they can win. The quota requires that for every man at least one woman has to be a winner. This affirmative action quota is expected to affect tournament entry through changes in the probability of winning; however other factors could influence entry as well. The paper finds that affirmative action causes a large increase in the tournament entry by women and a decrease in the entry by men. This change in behavior goes beyond changes warranted by the different probability in winning. Although some high-performing men drop out of the competition, many women come in, and the overall number of high-performing participants in the entry pool is barely affected. In fact the performance requirements for men and women are essentially the same under affirmative action, and there is limited or no reverse discrimination.
The intention behind imposing quotas for women on corporate boards is to close the gender gap in economic participation and help women to be promoted within organizations. However, the broader social psychological literature lends support to ideas that affirmative action policies, such as quotas, may do more harm than good for the beneficiaries. We extend this idea beyond the affected beneficiaries and ask whether this unintended negative effect spills over to women who are not immediate targets of the quota, by signaling incompetence. We develop an experimental design to investigate whether the announcement (study 1) and the implementation (study 2) of a quota for women have a direct negative effect on performance evaluations and hence reinforce the existing gender bias in evaluation. We observed that the performance of women was evaluated significantly lower than that of men. However, this gender bias was limited to sequential (rating) evaluations and was not evident in joint (ranking) evaluations. The quota did not significantly influence the amount of this bias. In addition, we observed more pronounced sexism in males compared to females. Results of study 2 gave a hint to an association between higher sexism and lower evaluations of women’s performance. We also found some evidence for a stronger evaluation bias in females when controlling for sexist attitudes. Hence, our results imply that the bias, which is overall quite robust and strongly pronounced, is still affected by individual gender-related characteristics.
Case study on female representation in an international standard setting organiszation (sample 1: n= 209 and sample 2: n= 307,210). Representation of women and minorities in a “selectorate”—the group that chooses an organization'sleaders—is a key mechanism for promoting diversity. The authors show that representation, on its own, is not sufficient for selecting gender diversity: a supportive organizational culture is also required. In the case of the Internet Engineering Task Force, a random increase in female representation in its selection committee caused an increase in female appointments only after cultural norms supporting diversityand inclusion became more salient.
Leibbrandt, A., & List, J. A. (2014). Do women avoid salary negotiations? Evidence from a large-scale natural field experiment. Management Science, 61(9), 2016-2024.
Natural field experiment in the U.S. with nearly 2,500 job-seekers applying for jobs and ten applicants actually hired at the end. The experiment tried to shed light on the question how different labor contracts influence the extent of salary negotiations and self-sorting into jobs. When there is no explicit statement that wages are negotiable, men are more likely to negotiate than women. However, when it is explicitly mention that wages are negotiable, this difference disappears, women are more likely to negotiate. Women prefer job environments where the ‘rules of wage determination’ are concrete, and in such settings they are at least as willing to negotiate as men. Alternatively, men prefer environments where the rules of wage determination are ambiguous because it is in those settings where they reap a disproportionate amount of the surplus, relative to women, because they negotiate more than women.
Cox, A. R., & Montgomerie, R. (2019). The cases for and against double-blind reviews. PeerJ, 7
Study on gender biases in published papers (n=4,865) , comparing journals and testing whether patterns changed over 9 years. Women may still be disadvantaged by the peer review process if reviewers’ biases lead them to reject publications with female authors more often. One potential solution to this perceived gender bias in the reviewing process is for journals to adopt double-blind reviews whereby neither the authors nor the reviewers are aware of each other’s identity and gender. To test the efficacy of double-blind reviews in one behavioral ecology journal (Behavioral Ecology, BE), the authors assigned gender to every authorship of every paper published for 2010–2018 in that journal compared to four other journals with single-blind reviews but similar subject matter and impact factors. While female authorships comprised only 35% of the total in all journals, the double-blind journal (BE) did not have more female authorships than its single-blind counterparts. Interestingly, the incidence of female authorship is higher at behavioral ecology journals (BE and Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology) than in the ornithology journals (Auk, Condor, Ibis) for papers on all topics as well as those on birds. These analyses suggest that double-blind review does not currently increase the incidence of female authorship in the journals studied here.
Chang, E. H., Kirgios, E. L., Rai, A., & Milkman, K. L. (2020). The isolated choice effect and its implications for gender diversity in organizations. Management Science.
Experimental study with six preregistered experiments (n = 3,509) showing that a feature of personnel selection decisions can influence the gender diversity of groups and teams. Specifically, the authors show that people are less likely to choose candidates whose gender would increase group diversity when making personnel selections in isolation (i.e., when they are responsible for selecting a single group member) than when making collections of choices (i.e., when they are responsible for selecting multiple group members). The authors call this the isolated choice effect. They demonstrate that the isolated choice effect has important consequences for group diversity. When making sets of hiring and selection decisions (as opposed to making a single hire), people construct more gender-diverse groups. Mediation and moderation studies suggest that people do not attend as much to diversity when making isolated selection choices, which drives this effect.
Multi-year field experiment with a US top-10 undergraduate accounting program that randomized the gender composition of semester-long teams (n=535 students). Using laboratory, survey, and administrative data, the authors find that even after accounting for their proportion of the group, token women are seen as less influential by their peers and are less likely to be chosen to represent the group than women on majority-women teams. Token women also participate slightly less in group discussions, receive fewer returns to participation when they do, and struggle to convert their task performance to influence. The authors show that women’s increased authority in majority-women teams is driven primarily by men’s behavior and not homophily. We find some evidence that token women see an increase in general assessments of influence over time, but this improvement does not translate to task-specific assessments. Finally, we show that predictors of future grades are different for token women than for other participants. Our findings have implications for how to approach team assignment in male-dominated settings and cast significant doubt on the idea that token women can solve influence gaps by “leaning in.”
Shan, X. (2020): Does Minority Status Drive Women Out Of Male-Dominated Fields?. Discussion paper.
Field experiment in an introductory economics course at a Swiss university randomizing the composition of study groups with n=620 students. The paper examines whether women's status as the minority gender causes them to drop out of male-dominated elds. The author conducts a field experiment in an introductory economics course where students were randomly assigned to small study groups with different gender compositions. Results show that women assigned to female-minority groups become 10 percentage points more likely to drop out of the course than women assigned to other groups. In contrast, minority status does not signicantly affect men's dropout behavior. The author presents suggestive evidence on educational expectations and peer-to-peer interaction as underlying mechanisms through which minority status raises female dropout. Women in the minority form more pessimistic expectations about their future academic achievement and interact less frequently with their peers. The findings of the paper suggest that minority status can reinforce itself and underrepresented groups can be trapped in a vicious cycle of being in the minority.
Dahl, G., Kotsadam, A., & Rooth, D. O. (2021). Does integration change gender attitudes? The effect of randomly assigning women to traditionally male teams. Forthcoming: Quarterly Journal of Economics
Study outside of academica: military in Norway. The authors examine whether exposure of men to women in a traditionally male-dominated environment can change attitudes about mixed-gender productivity, gender roles and gender identity. Context is the military in Norway, where they randomly assigned female recruits to some squads but not others during boot camp. They find that living and working with women for 8 weeks causes men to have more egalitarian attitudes. There is a 14 percentage point higher fraction of men who think mixed-gender teams perform as well or better than same-gender teams, an 8 percentage point increase in men who think household work should be shared equally and a 14 percentage point increase in men who do not completely disavow feminine traits. Moreover, men exposed to mixed-gender teams are more likely to choose military occupations immediately after boot camp which have a higher fraction of females in them. But these effects do not persist once treatment stops. Treated men’s attitudes converge to those of the controls in a 6-month follow up survey and there is no long-term effect on choosing fields of study, occupations or workplaces with a higher fraction of women in them after military service ends. Contrary to the predictions of many policymakers, the authors do not find that integrating women into squads hurt male recruits’ performance or satisfaction with service, either during boot camp or their subsequent military assignment. These findings provide evidence that even in a highly gender-skewed environment, gender stereotypes are malleable and can be altered by integrating members of the opposite sex. But they also suggest that without continuing intensive exposure, effects are unlikely to persist.
Feeney, M. K., Bernal, M., & Bowman, L. (2014). Enabling work? Family-friendly policies and academic productivity for men and women scientists. Science and Public Policy, 41(6), 750-764
US study with faculty in six fields of science using responses from a national survey of 1,598 faculty at 150 research universities and data from status of women reports and faculty handbooks. Universities throughout the USA have adopted family-friendly policies to enable life and career balance and to encourage the attraction and retention of women scientists. Although family-leave policies are designed to provide job protection for parents and ensure that faculty can remain productive scholars, it is unclear whether or not formal family-leave policies have played a positive role in areas of academic productivity such as publishing and teaching. This research investigates the relationships between university family-leave policies and productivity. The hierarchical multi-level analysis indicates that generous formal family-leave policies, on-site childcare, and spousal hiring policies differently affect the productivity of women and men academic scientists: For women, leave policies are related to increased journal publications and maintenance of teaching loads, whereas for men, leave policies are reducing teaching loads. Formal policies related to delaying the tenure clock, however, are not significantly related to productivity.
Review paper on the literature if gender differences in negotiations are better adressed be "fix-the-instituion" or "fix-the-women" policies. Men more than women succeed when negotiating over labor-market outcomes, and gender differences in negotiation likely contribute to the gender wage gap and to horizontal and vertical segregation in the labor market. The authors review the evidence on the many initiatives that have been put in place to reduce the effect of gender differences in negotiation. Categorizing these as either ‘fix-the-women’ or ‘fix-the-institutions’ initiatives they find serious challenges to the former. Women do not appear to be broken and encouraging them to negotiate more and differently often backfires. The evidence suggests that ‘fix-the-institution’ initiatives are more effective in reducing gender differences in outcomes. Concerns of adverse effects of banning negotiations or salary history requests have not materialized, and preliminary evidence points to reductions in the gender differences in negotiation outcomes. The strongest evidence on effectiveness in narrowing gender disparities is found for policies that increase transparency. Numerous studies find that gender differences in negotiation diminish when it is clear what to expect from the negotiation and suggest that initiatives which improve transparency are likely to help equalize opportunities at the bargaining table.
Card, D., DellaVigna, S., Funk, P., & Iriberri, N. (2020). Gender Differences in Peer Recognition by Economists.
International study looking at the effect of gender on being nominated and selected as a Fellow of the Econometric Society. The authors study the evolving gender gap in peer recognition in Economics. They begin by analyzing the selection of Fellows of the Econometric Society, one of the oldest and most prestigious international societies in the field. Using publicly available information on Fellows elected each year from 1933 onward, merged with a new data set of over 40,000 “actively publishing” economists, they estimate the effect of gender on selection as a fellow over the past seven decades. The baseline models include controls for cumulative publications in each of the top 5 journals, citations to these papers, and publications in a broad set of general interest and field journals. The authors then propose to use confidential data obtained from the Econometric Society on nominations and vote shares in the last 13 years (2006-2019) to decompose the gender gap in selection as a fellow into components attributable to differences in the probability of being nominated and in the probability of being successfully elected if nominated. They provide a broader perspective on their findings for the Econometric Society by conducting a parallel analysis of gender gaps in selection as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Economic Association, as well as being awarded a Sloan Foundation Fellowship. The authors conclude by analyzing several of the channels that may mediate the gender gap in peer recognition, including visibility, networking, and credit for coauthored work.
Unpublished Document, Abstract copied from the AEA website.
Kleemans, M., & Thornton, R. (2021). Who Belongs? How Much is Belonging Worth? The Determinants and Effects of Selective Membership in the Economics Profession.
"A growing literature has documented, and provided evidence of mechanisms contributing to, the gender gap in Economics. We add to this literature by examining the determinants of membership into selective professional organizations, how this varies by gender, and examine how these organizations contribute to productivity in publishing and promotion. We will use data on memberships over time from NBER, CEPR, IZA, and BREAD that involve a nomination and review process. We will combine this with data from CVs from all economists working at one of the 131 R1 universities in the US and data on quantity and quality of publications, and number of citations. First, we will examine what predicts membership into professional organizations, the timing of membership, and compare those determinants across gender and over time. In particular, we will study the probability of being a member as a function of various parameters, including the number of publications, journal rankings, and number of citations. Using network data on advisor-advisee links, co-authors, and PhD granting institutions, we will examine the importance of various network components, such as whether the advisor is a member or director of a selective organization. Second, we will examine how membership affects professional promotion and productivity, including number of journal publications and number of citations. We show this using an event study analysis to identify how citations and productivity change after inclusion into the organization. Understanding the dynamics of selective professional organizations through these analyses will help design interventions that can target women in Economics at all levels, for retention and promotion."
Experimental study at Yale University with n=341 students. Concern that masculine generic language (e.g., man to mean humanity) perpetuates gender inequity has led several institutions to formally discourage its use. While previous experimental research indicates that generic terms like man bring more exemplars of men than women to mind, only recently have researchers begun exploring additional consequences of gendered language. Understanding the range of processes affected is of particular importance when evaluating real-world policies. Yale University recently changed the title of a leadership role from master to head. The present study (N=341) investigated what exemplars come to mind (i.e., cognitive accessibility) while also probing memory for women and men in the leadership role both before and after Yale’s language policy change. Students exposed to master generated a male exemplar more than would be expected by the incidence of men and recognized actual men than women in the role more accurately (d’) in a face recognition task. Among students exposed to head, both biases were eliminated. The previous literature shows that masculine generic language brings men to mind. The present work demonstrates a similar effect but in an applied context while further documenting consequences for memory. Gender-inclusive language polices have potential to reduce gender biased thinking with applied significance.