Volume 33, Number 1 (Winter) 1998: Symposium on Microeconomic Methods

Neumark, David, and Rosella Gardecki. 1998. "Women Helping Women? Role-Model and Mentoring Effects on  Female Ph.D. Students in Economics." Journal of Human Resources 33(1): 220-246.

One potential method to increase the success of female graduate students in economics is to encourage mentoring relationships between these students and female faculty members, via increased hiring of female faculty, or having female faculty serve as dissertation chairs for female students. This paper examines whether either of these strategies results in more successful outcomes for female graduate students, using survey information on female graduate students and faculties of Ph.D.-producing economics departments. The empirical evidence provides virtually no support for the hypothesis that initial job placements for female graduate students are improved by adding female faculty members, or by having a female dissertation chair. However, female faculty members appear to reduce time spent in graduate school by female students.

David Neumark is a professor of economics at Michigan State University and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Rosella Gardecki is a research associate at the Center for Hunan Resource Research, The Ohio State University. The authors thank Jody Messer and Ramona Taylor for assistance with the research, and Kathleen Beegle, Harry Holzer, Robert Lalonde, Jennifer Tracey, and anonymous referees for helpful comments. Requests for additional analyses of these data that preserve the confidentiality of the departments providing data can be submitted beginning May 1998 through February 2001 to Professor Davad Neumark, Department of Economics, Marsha R. Hall, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Ml 48824.