Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP14190
Authors: Patricia Funk; Nagore Iriberri; Giulia Savio
Abstract: Scarcity of female academics has been well documented for math-intensive orSTEM fields. We investigate whether a lack of female instructors creates ademand for diversity on the student side. In an incentivized instructor-choiceexperiment on MTurk, we experimentally vary the gender balancedness of theinstructor pool and let participants choose one additional instructor among onemale and one female. We find that participants value diversity when femaleinstructors are scarce. The effect is statistically significant for women but notfor men, and these gender differences get further amplified when we restrict theattention to a sub-sample of participants who made a more meditated choice.Women also appreciate diversity, when scarcity concerns the opposite sex - incontrast to men, who value diversity only when the scarce gender is their own.
Keywords: instructor-choice experiment; gender scarcity
JEL Codes: J16
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| gender unbalance (J16) | likelihood of selecting a female instructor (J16) |
| female instructor scarcity (J21) | likelihood of selecting a female instructor (J16) |
| male instructor scarcity (J79) | likelihood of valuing diversity (J78) |
| female instructor scarcity (J21) | value of female instructors (J16) |
| female decision-makers (J16) | value of female instructors (J16) |