The gender gap in economics remains difficult to shift, and lots of economists are working on ways to make a difference at the margin. Back in 2018, I wrote about an intervention that brought female role models into class that seemed to have a positive effect on female students continuing their studies in economics beyond the first-year paper (based on this paper by Porter and Serra). It seemed promising, so I tried something similar in my classes later that year, bringing in female and Māori alumni to give some short guest lectures. It didn't appear to have a great effect (and isn't something I could test experimentally, as there is no obvious control group), squeezed the rest of the curriculum, and was challenging to coordinate. So, the trial was short-lived.
Perhaps I should have persisted? This 2023 NBER Working Paper (sorry, I don't see an ungated version online) by Arpita Patnaik (Charles River Associates), Gwyn Pauley (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Joanna Venator (Boston College), and Matthew Wiswall (University of Wisconsin-Madison) broadens the case for having role models come into class for short guest lectures. In their experiment undertaken at the University of Wisconsin-Madison:
...we invited alumni who graduated from the department to give a fifteen minute presentation to the Econ 101 courses in the sixth week of classes. The study took place during the 2018-19 academic year, encompassing the Fall 2018 and Spring 2019 semesters...
The alumni speakers were given a series of questions as prompts, including questions about their first jobs out of college, their experiences in economics course work, the skills they think they gained in the economics courses, and how an economics degree helps them in the work force.
Like the Porter and Serra experiment, this one is fairly low-key. Patnaik et al. evaluate it by comparing students who were in lecture groups where the guest speakers presented with students who were in lecture groups where no guest speaker presented. They also look at the results separately by gender, and the results for different gender combinations of speakers and students. They find that:
...the alumni intervention increases the likelihood that students continue in economics by taking intermediate microeconomics by 2.1 percentage points or 11% more than the baseline level. We find that these effects are much larger when we look at the effects separately by gender of the speaker and gender of the student. A male speaker increases the likelihood that male students take intermediate microeconomics by 8.1 percentage points or 36% (from the base rate of 22.5%) and has no significant effect on women. Female speakers increase the likelihood that female students take intermediate microeconomics by 5.0 percentage points or 40% (from the base rate of 12.4%) and have no significant effect on men.
They also find that:
...students are affected by speakers similar to themselves. Our speakers were all White and two worked for a Wisconsin-based company... We find that the effects of the intervention on course take-up are larger for White students and state residents.
They show that the additional economics majors are mainly shifting from business majors. Finally, they show that there are negligible impacts (if any) on student grades, either in the current course or in following courses in economics.
Taken all together, these results suggest that we probably should bring in alumni speakers to talk to students, if we want to encourage greater enrolment in the economics major. The effects are surprisingly large (an increase from 12.4 to 17.4 percent of female students going further in economics), which suggests that they are probably worth what is likely to be a fairly modest cost. And we need to be willing to pay the cost - as I noted above, we stopped the trial in my classes in part because it became difficult to coordinate the guest speakers.
However, we need to be mindful about who we bring in as guest speakers. If we also want to close the gender gap, we should be inviting more female speakers than male speakers. And, if we want to close the gap for other underrepresented groups, we should be inviting speakers from those groups.
None of the results from this paper are terribly surprising, but it is important that we keep these things in mind. Low-touch interventions can sometimes have important positive impacts.
[HT: Marginal Revolution, last year]
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