Over the last week, I have posted a series of posts focused mainly on the gender gap in economics (most recently here). Just prior to that, I posted on the impact of student-teacher gender matches on academic performance. However, relationships with teachers are not the only relationships that matter for student performance. In some universities, freshman students are allocated to an academic advisor, and many view this as best practice in ensuring a smooth transition from high school to university. Given the apparent importance of gender matches with teachers, it is worthwhile considering whether gender matches with academic advisors matter for students' academic performance as well.
That is the research question that is addressed by this 2021 article by Takao Kato and| Yang Song (both Colgate University), published in the journal Economic Inquiry (sorry, I don't see an ungated version online). Their data covers all students enrolled from 1996 to 2015 in a selective liberal arts university in the US (which they refer to as LiberalArtsU), which:
...requires every student to take a FYS [first-year seminar] course during their first semester. The instructor of the FYS course automatically becomes their academic adviser and remains the adviser until the student declares their major, which often happens in the second semester of the sophomore year. These FYS courses differ from a standard introductory‐level course in two ways. First, the class size is slightly smaller to limit the advising burden on the instructor, as well as to foster a community‐building environment. Second, the course is required to have a few components to help with high school to college transition, such as teaching students about plagiarism, library resources, and writing skills.
Kato and Song's dataset includes over 14,000 students, with just over half being female. Like many studies of this type, selection bias could be an issue if students could choose their advisor (or their advisor's gender). However, in this case:
...the incoming student makes the course preference list without knowledge of the instructor gender. As such, no student can select the gender of their FYS instructor and therefore the gender of their adviser. Yet, students could influence the odds of having the same‐gender adviser indirectly through FYS course subject choice, as certain subjects have a higher proportion of female professors than others.
So, controlling for the FYS that a student is enrolled in is important, and will deal with residual selection issues. In terms of outcome variables, Kato and Song look at four-year retention in study, GPA, and post-graduation outcomes (that is, whether the student was employed or enrolled in graduate school, rather than unemployed). Looking at retention first, they find that:
The magnitude of the effect on 4‐year retention rate is modest yet meaningful. On average... around 90.5% of all students were retained for 4 years or completed their Bachelor's degrees at LiberalArtsU. Matching female students with female advisers is found to raise it to 93.95%.
You could look at that as a 3.45 percentage point increase in retention, or a 3.8 percent increase. Alternatively, you could recognise that the attrition rate (the proportion of students who are not retained) is 3.45 percentage points lower for female students matched with female advisors, and this is a 36.3 percent decrease in attrition - I wouldn't describe that as modest! Kato and Song then demonstrate that most of the effect is concentrated in retention in the first two years of study (which is not surprising, since most attrition occurs in the first year of study).
Moving onto the effect of gender-matching female students with female advisors on GPA, Kato and Song find that the effect is:
...positive and significant at the 1% level, pointing to the presence of the positive gender match effect on the intensive margin. The size of the gender match effect on cumulative GPA amounts to about 7.8% of a standard deviation...
That's larger than it sounds, and interestingly, Kato and Song demonstrate that it isn't concentrated in first year papers, so it is persistent throughout the students' degree study. Then, looking at post-study outcomes, Kato and Song find that the effect:
...is small and not at all significantly different from zero, pointing to the absence of the gender match effect on the post‐graduation early labor market outcome, or whether students are employed or not within 6 months after graduation...
So, female students matched with female academic advisors are more likely to be retained in study, and perform better in their studies, but are no more likely to be employed or in graduate study after graduation. However, the story doesn't end there. Kato and Song look at whether the effects differ by student academic ability (based on their high school GPA), and find that:
...the gender match effects both on the extensive and intensive margins are mostly larger and more significant for students with below‐median high school GPA than for students with above‐median high school GPA. In particular, the gender match effect on the intensive margin (cumulative GPA) is statistically significant only for students with below‐median high school GPA... This suggests that for relatively more college‐ready students, adviser-student gender match has little impact on their decision to pursue further education in graduate schools. For relatively less college‐ready female students, however, having female advisers is proved to be instrumental in making them pursue graduate education rather than immediate employment.
So, the effects on retention and GPA are concentrated among less college-ready students, and those female students benefit from a higher probability of going on to graduate school when they are matched with a female advisor. Interesting, Kato and Song then extend these results by looking separately at students in STEM FYS courses and non-STEM FYS courses, and find that the effects are concentrated in the non-STEM FYS courses. On this last point, they conclude that:
...students who took a STEM course as an FYS course, indicating interest and commitment to STEM, do not seem to benefit from gender match in advising.
That may be true, but it is possible to disentangle whether that is because the types of students who choose a STEM FYS are less likely to benefit than students who choose a non-STEM FYS, or whether the types of instructors in STEM and non-STEM FYSs are different. This would require some further analysis, which Kato and Song do not undertake.
That points to a more general problem with this research, which Kato and Song acknowledge. While they are able to show that matching female students to female advisors has positive effects, concentrated among less-college-ready female students, they are unable to explain why. And understanding the mechanism is important for knowing whether these results would replicate in other contexts.
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