Wednesday 26 January 2022

The positive effect of mentoring for female economists

On Sunday, I posted about the disappointing results from evaluations of simple information interventions to reduce the gender gap in economics, based on several papers from last year's issue of AEA Papers and Proceedings. However, not all of the research in that issue had bad news in dealing with the gender gap. This article by Donna Ginther (University of Kansas) and Rina Na (PRA Health Science) evaluated the impact of the CeMENT workshops, on the co-authorship networks and publication outcomes of female economists. To give you some more context about the workshops, Ginther and Na explain that:

The CeMENT Mentoring Workshop for Faculty in Doctoral Programs was designed to provide role models (senior female economists) and peers in one’s research field. The workshop is held immediately after the ASSA meetings and lasts two days. Between 40 and 50 junior faculty attend and are divided into groups of 4 to 5 women in the same field. Two senior female economists in the same field are assigned to mentor each group. Prior to the conference, each woman circulates a research paper that will be read and discussed by the group. In between group sessions, plenary sessions made up of a panel of senior mentors focused on the topics of research and publishing, getting grants, networking strategies, teaching, the tenure process, and work-life balance.

Ginther and Na essentially compare workshop participants with others who applied for the workshop but were not accepted. Their dataset covers the workshops between 2004 and 2016, and includes 512 female economists. They focus their analysis on pre-tenure publications, and the outcome variables measured in 2018, and find that:

Women who participated in the CeMENT workshop published 1.6 more papers (representing a 26 percent increase at the mean), 0.21 additional top-tier papers (representing a 78 percent increase), and 0.96 additional other refereed papers (representing a 16 percent increase), all statistically significant at p < 0.05...

In addition, the CeMENT workshop significantly expanded a woman’s pre-tenure collaborations, adding three additional coauthors relative to the treatment group (a 51 percent increase)... Finally, the treatment group had 43 more citations to pre- tenure publications than the control group (a 45 percent increase).

That all seems very positive. However, when they split their sample into women at institutions ranked in the top 200 and women at institutions ranked outside the top 200 (or an nonacademic institutions), the effects differed. The increase in total publications was larger for women outside the top institutions (1.6 additional publications, compared with 1.3), but this was concentrated in additional publications outside of the top journals and top field journals. The citation impact was also greater for women outside the top institutions (61 additional citations, compared with 16), although the number of additional co-authors was smaller (2.2 additional co-authors, compared with 3.4).

These are important results. This isn't the first time that the mentoring of emerging female economists by established female economists has been shown to have a positive effect (e.g. see here). I think it's particularly important that the effects seem to be larger at lower-ranked institutions, where (as discussed in this article in the same issue of AEA Papers and Proceedings, which I will discuss in my next post) the gender gap appears to be larger and more persistent. Perhaps the most important aspect of this intervention is that it appears to be quite cost-effective (although, it would be interesting to know how much time the intervention did cost the mentors, and whether it impacted negatively, or perhaps even positively, on their research output or research quality).

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