Women have been traditionally underrepresented in several fields of study, notably those with the highest returns. This under-representation may have serious implications for women's returns to education, occupational segregation, and earnings inequality. While in the last two decades many disciplines in the U.S., including mathematics and physical sciences, have made significant progress in attracting and retaining women, there has been little improvement in other fields (e.g., economics).
To address this problem, some suggest increasing role models for female students by inviting female graduates or hiring more women faculty members. This might reduce the gender gap. Different studies in different fields at different points of the career show, that female role models (mostly female faculty members) do have a positive effect on women choosing fields of studies they are underrepresented in. Even small scale interventions like inviting female speakers to an undergraduate course were shown to have positive effects.
Focusing on the effect of a female department chair, Langan (2019) shows that a female department chair decreases the gender publication gap, the gender earnings, and the gender promotion gap. However, it did not increase the share of female faculty.
Natural experiment exploiting a dataset of about 9,000 students of the U.S. Air Force Academy for a wide variety of mandatory standardized courses. The study tests what happens when students are randomly assigned to professors of different genders. The results suggest that although professor gender has only a limited impact on male students, it has a powerful effect on female students’ performance in math and science classes, their likelihood of taking future math and science courses, and their likelihood of graduating with a STEM degree. The estimates are robust to the inclusion of controls for students’ initial ability, and they are substantially largest for students with high math scores in a standardized test widely used for college admissions in the United States. Among these students, the gender gap in course grades and college majors does not exist anymore when female students are assigned to introductory math and science professors who are female. The authors find the largest effects among high-ability women with a predisposition toward math and science is important because this group of women is, arguably, the set of women most suited for entering science and engineering careers. In contrast, the gender of professors teaching humanities courses has, at best, a limited impact on students’ outcomes. Furthermore, the authors distinguish the role of professor gender itself from the role of other (unobservable) professor characteristics that are correlated with gender. This is done by estimating each professor’s average “value-added” separately for male and female students. They find that some male professors are very effective at teaching female students—even more effective than they are at teaching male students. However, the authors find that the female introductory math and science professors continue to exert a positive influence on female students’ long-run outcomes, even after controlling for professors’ average value-added.
This US study explores a potential determinant of this STEM gender using newly collected data on the career trajectories of United States Air Force Academy students (n=5,929). The authors use a similar dataset then Carrell et al and they are able to closely replicate Carrell et al.'s basic results: High-ability female students who were assigned female professors did better in their first-year (and subsequent) math and science courses and were more likely to graduate with a STEM degree. This papers focus is on the effects of being assigned female math and science professors on later stages of the career trajectory: occupation choice and postgraduate education. The authors find that, among high-ability female students, being assigned a female professor leads to substantial increases in the probability of working in a STEM occupation and the probability of receiving a STEM master’s degree. The authors conclude that based on their results, actively recruiting female math and science professors—and encouraging them to interact and mentor their female students—could have meaningful and long-lasting effects on the career trajectories of women.
Ongoing field experiment at U.S. universities testing if better course information, mentoring and role models, or more relevant instructional content and presentation style could increase the number of women majoring in economics. The Undergraduate Women in Economics Challenge began in 2015 as a Randomized Controlled Trial with 20 treatment schools and at least 30 control schools to evaluate whether better course information, mentoring, encouragement, career counseling, and more relevant instructional content could encourage more women to choose economics classes. Although the experiment is still in the field, results from several within treatment-school randomized trials demonstrate that uncomplicated and inexpensive interventions can substantially increase women in economics. As an example, in one university the treatment was as follows: (i) students in the treatment arm were shown a video during a section about careers in economics and given information on the earnings of economists; (ii) female students in the treatment arm received information on the grade distribution at mid-term and those at and above the median were sent letters praising their work and encouraging them to major in the field; and (iii) female students in the treatment arm, regardless of their grades, were encouraged to partake in peer mentoring activities. The preliminary results for this university suggest that the aggregate impact of all three treatments was substantial (increasing stated majors of women by more than 50 percent from baseline levels of 0.13, conditional on taking principles), particularly given the small cost. Although each intervention had some impact, treatment (ii), which encouraged female students who had a grade above the median to major in the field, had the greatest effect.
Field experiment with about 500 undergraduate students in Principles of Economics courses at a U.S. university testing if through exposure to carefully assigned female role models, more women will major in economics. Using a differences in differences estimation the authors show that when a randomly selected a subset of classes are assigned to the role model treatment this increased the percentage of women planning to major in economics (survey-based) and actually enrolling in intermediate economics classes (administrative data) the semester and year following the intervention. Furthermore, results suggest that, while the role model intervention had no impact on male students, it significantly increased female students’ likelihood of expressing interest in the economics major and enrolling in further economics classes.
The study shows the results of an experiment among more than 2,000 students enrolled in Economics Principles courses, which assessed whether students respond to messages about majoring in Economics, and whether this response varies by student gender. The intervention proceeds in two phases: In the first phase, randomly assigned students received a message with basic information about the Economics major, or the basic message combined with an emphasis on the rewarding careers or financial returns associated with the major (including videos with a role model). A control group received no such messages. In the second phase, all students receiving a grade of B- or better received a message after the course ended encouraging them to major in Economics. For a randomly chosen subset of these students, the message also encouraged them to persist in Economics even if their grade was disappointing. The basic message increased the proportion of male students majoring in Economics by 2 percentage points, equivalent to the control mean. The authors find no significant effects for female students. Extrapolating to the full sample, the basic message would nearly double the male/female ratio among Economics majors. The authors conclude that their results suggest the limits of light-touch interventions to promote diversity in Economics.
Field experiment at a U.S. Military Academy with about 6,000 same gender and race/ethnicity matches investigating the effect of same-gender or same-race mentors on occupation choice in the United States Army. The authors find that when a female cadet is assigned a female mentor, the cadet is 4.60 and 18.1 percentage points more likely to pick her officer’s branch as her first or among her top three occupational preferences, respectively, than if she had interacted with a male mentor. These results are robust to controlling for a limited choice set for females and a host of alternative specifications. When focusing on same-race mentors, the study finds that black cadets paired with black officers are 6.1 percentage points more likely to pick their role model’s branch than if the black cadet had worked with a white officer. These results show that having a same-gender or same-race mentor may influence the occupation choice of women or racial minorities.
Study using a comprehensive, longitudinal dataset of nearly 54,000 U.S. students across a wide range of subjects, examining whether the presence of same-gender faculty members affects student interest in a subject using. To address biases due to course selection and student preferences- female students' choices for a course might be influenced by the fact that the instructor is female rather than the subject of the course, the study employs an instrumental variables strategy. Due to sabbaticals, hirings, retirements, and temporary shifts in the number of sections offered in a particular course, there is variation term-by-term in the proportion of courses taught by female faculty in a department. The study uses this variation as the instrumental variables that are related to a student’s likelihood of having a female instructor but unrelated to a student’s pre-college interest in a subject. Furthermore, the authors augment this instrumental strategy by including course fixed effects to compare students who take the same courses but have different types of instructors due to multiple sections being offered or the fact that the course was taken in different years.
The results suggest that female instructors do positively influence course selection and major choice in some disciplines thus supporting a possible role model effect. However, the study fails to find positive and significant effects in some male-dominated fields: The results are particularly positive and strong in mathematics and statistics, geology, sociology, and journalism. In other fields, such as engineering, physics, and computer science, the researchers do not find female faculty to have statistically significant effects. The small proportions of female faculty (especially once course fixed effects are included) make it difficult to estimate accurately the effects of women in these disciplines.
U.S. study exploiting a dataset that links a panel of over 2,500 graduate students’ administrative transcript records from six U.S. universities to a dataset with information on the research environment for all students who are supported by federal research grants. Utilizing within-program variation in the gender composition of doctoral cohorts in STEM, the authors identify the effect of female peers on Ph.D. persistence and completion. The study finds that women who enter into cohorts with no female peers are 11.9 percentage points less likely to graduate within 6 years than their male counterparts. However, a 1 standard deviation increase in the percentage of female peers in a cohort differentially increases the probability of on-time graduation for women by 4.6 percentage points. These gender peer effects function almost completely through changes in the probability of dropping out in the first year of a Ph.D. program and are largest in programs that are typically male-dominated.
Langan, A. (2018). Female Managers and Gender Disparities: The Case of Academic Department Chairs. Discussion Paper
U.S. study exploiting a database (n=6134) of department chairs and faculty in economics, sociology, accounting, and political science across nearly 200 institutions spanning more than 35 years. Using variation in the timing of transition between male and female department chairs with difference- in differences research design the paper shows that a female chair reduces the gender publication gap, the gender pay gap, and the gender promotion gap. Academia offers an ideal setting in which to study the influence of managers. Worker productivity (in the form of academic journal publications) is observable, as are earnings at most public schools, and academics have predictable career progression benchmarks. And because most departments regularly or semi-regularly rotate chairs, the paper observes the impact of different managers on outcomes for the same individuals.
Among assistant professors, working more years under a female department chair is associated with smaller gender gaps in publication and tenure outcomes. The gender earnings gap among faculty shrinks in the years after a woman replaces a man as chair. Female chairs raise the number of women in incoming graduate student cohorts without affecting the number of men. However. the paper does not find an increase in women’s representation on the faculty, and no effect of a female chair on ability correlates for the average student or the number of top papers published per capita at the departmental level. This suggests that the reduction in these gaps comes without penalty to departmental output.
Krishna, A., & Orhun, A. Y. (2020). EXPRESS: Gender (Still) Matters in Business School. Journal of Marketing Research. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022243720972368
US Study with dataset of 6,312 students at a Business School and their perfomance in quantitative and qualitative courses taught by instructurs of different genders. The research documents systematic gender performance differences (GPD) at a top business school using a unique administrative dataset and survey of students. The findings show that women’s grades are 11% of a standard deviation lower in quantitative courses than those of men with similar academic aptitude and demographics, and men’s grades are 23% of a standard deviation lower in nonquantitative courses than those of comparable women. The authors discuss and test for different reasons for this finding. They show that a female instructor significantly cuts down GPD for quantitative courses by raising the grades of women. In addition, female instructors increase women’s interest and performance expectations in these courses and are perceived as role models by their female students. These results provide support for a gender stereotype process for GPD and show that faculty can serve as powerful exemplars to challenge gender stereotypes and increase student achievement. The authors discuss several important implications of these findings for business schools and for society.
Survey among undergraduate students (n=3,344) in seven Chilean universities. Recent research has highlighted unequal treatment for women in academic economics along several different dimensions, including promotion, hiring, credit for co-authorship, and standards for publication in professional journals. Can the source of these differences lie in biases against women that are pervasive in the discipline, even among students in the earliest stages of their training? In this paper, the authors provide evidence on the importance of explicit and implicit biases against women among students in economics relative to other fields. They conducted a large scale survey among undergraduate students in Chilean universities, among both entering first-year students and students in years 2 and above. On a wide battery of measures, economics students are more biased than students in other fields. Economics students are somewhat more biased already upon entry, before exposure to any economics classes. The gap is more pronounced among students in years 2 and above, in particular for male students. The authors also find an increase in bias in a sample of students that they follow longitudinally. Differences in political ideology explain essentially all the gap at entry, but none of the increase in the gap with exposure. Exposure to female students and faculty attenuates some of the bias.