Women Helping Women, Men Helping Women? Same-Gender Mentoring, Initial Job Placements, and Early Career Publishing Success for Economics PhDs

Women have been traditionally underrepresented within the ranks of academic economists. As such, the graduate education and early career success of female economists is an important concern for members of the profession. Within the sciences, a commonly proposed method for fostering the growth of female scholars is the pairing of female PhD students with female dissertation advisors. As proof of the scientific community’s commitment to the concept of same-gender mentoring, the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP) has twice received funding from the National Science Foundation to “implement and evaluate a series of mentoring workshops for junior economists, focusing particularly on issues relevant to women economists at the beginning of their careers” (Francine D. Blau 2004, 531). While funding such programs may be intuitively appealing, assessing their impact is fundamentally an empirical concern. Surprisingly, we are aware of one study by David Neumark and Rosella Gardecki (1998) which attempts to quantify the potential impact of same-gender mentoring on the early-career outcomes of PhD students. We add to this sparse literature by analyzing a sample of 1,900 individuals receiving economics PhDs from the top-30 programs between 1990 and 1994. Our source for the student’s advisor, PhD year, and PhD program is the Disserta tion Abstracts database. We collect individualspecific, peer-reviewed publication data as Women Helping Women, Men Helping Women? Same-Gender Mentoring, Initial Job Placements, and Early Career Publishing Success for Economics PhDs