Bridging the Gap: Increasing Representation of Women in the Economics Profession, from Students to Faculty
Paper Session
Sunday, Jan. 5, 2025 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM (PST)
- Chair: Donna Ginther, University of Kansas
My Department Cares: Supporting College Students through Encouragement Emails
Abstract
We examine the impact of an intervention targeting all economics majors at a large public university and designed to provide encouragement during challenging periods in the semester. We randomly selected students who would receive six weekly emails on behalf of the department of economics during the latter half of the Fall 2021 semester. Drawing insights from studies in social psychology, we designed the emails with the aim of enhancing students' sense of belonging and academic support, while providing information about resources available to students. In addition, for a subsample of the treated students, each email also featured a peer role models, i.e., a former student who had recently graduated from the same university. We chose the role models to be primarily women and Hispanic. A third treatment group also received, in each email, an encouragement message from the featured role model. Preliminary findings show evidence of a statistically significant negative impact of the encouragement emails on women's likelihood of failing at least one economics class during the semester of the intervention, notably driven by Hispanic women. These early results underscore the critical role of departmental encouragement and a supportive atmosphere in addressing disparities and promoting academic success, particularly among traditionally marginalized groups in economics.Star Secrets? Examining the Gendered Effects of Collaboration on Junior Economists' Success
Abstract
Do women navigate the path to success differently in economics? This paper explores whether collaborating with prominent female economists ("superstars") offers early-career women unique advantages in navigating this path. Utilizing publication data and a matched-control design, I examine the gender-specific impact of superstar co-authorship on junior economists' publication success in the US. My findings reveal that collaborating with a female superstar provides a significantly greater publication boost for junior women compared to collaborating with a male superstar. Conversely, junior men's publication success remains unaffected by the collaborator's gender. These results suggest that female superstars offer distinct benefits beyond just knowledge transfer, potentially equipping early-career women with additional skills to navigate gender-based barriers. I hypothesize that female superstars, having faced similar challenges themselves, possess and utilize non-cognitive skills crucial for success in economics. These skills, potentially less important for male superstars, can be particularly valuable for junior female collaborators. This research underscores the importance of investigating gender-specific factors that influence and define success within the male-dominated field of economics publishing.Gender Differences in the Response to Incentives
Abstract
Women are underrepresented in academia and many other high-skilled professions, especially at higher-ranked positions (e.g. Ginther and Kahn, 2004; Auriol et al., 2022; Sherman and Tookes, 2022). Do gender differences in the response to incentives contribute to this? Academia and other knowledge work jobs feature both explicit incentives (e.g. publication bonuses) and implicit market-based incentives in the form of career concerns (e.g. attraction bonuses negotiated in contract talks). Women may respond less strongly to career-concern incentives, as they tend to be less mobile, which weakens their bargaining position in the market (Caldwell and Danieli, 2024), and less likely to negotiate (Babcock and Laschever, 2003; Biasi and Sarsons, 2022). Furthermore, career-concern incentives may be more subjective and, thus, biased (Lundberg and Stearns, 2019; Card et al. 2019).This paper studies gender differences in the response to explicit performance incentives and career-concern incentives by exploiting the introduction of performance pay in German academia as a natural experiment and using a newly constructed data set encompassing the affiliations and publication records of the universe of German academics. The performance pay scheme introduced career-concern and explicit incentives that take effect at different times, and the specifics of the rollout give rise to differential incidence of incentives across tenure and age cohorts. This allows me to causally and separately identify effort effects of career-concern and explicit incentives in men and women in a difference-in-differences framework.
I find that male academics have a significant effort response to career-concern incentives only, of 16% to 19%, while female academics have a significant effort response to explicit performance incentives only, of 36% to 40%. Since career-concern incentives tend to be (much) higher-powered, the absence of an effort response to career-concern incentives in women may contribute to gaps in performance, promotion, and consequently, underrepresentation at higher ranks.
Discussant(s)
Kristy Buzard
,
Syracuse University
Sarah Jacobson
,
Williams College
Maxine Lee
,
San Francisco State University
Ina Ganguli
,
University of Massachusetts-Amherst
JEL Classifications
- A2 - Economic Education and Teaching of Economics
- J1 - Demographic Economics