 Women in economics: The role of gendered references at entry in the professionAudinga Baltrunaite, Alessandra Casarico and Lucia Rizzica European Economic Review, 2025, vol. 180, issue C Abstract: We study the presence and the extent of gender differences in reference letters for graduate students in economics and finance, and how they relate to early labor market outcomes. To these ends, we build a novel rich dataset and combine Natural Language Processing techniques with standard regression analysis. We find that men are described more often as standout and women as grindstone, i.e., hardworking and diligent; these differences are mainly driven by male letter writers, especially more senior ones. We then show that the former (latter) characteristics relate positively (negatively) with various subsequent career outcomes and that women obtain lower positive (marginally larger negative) returns from being described as standout (grindstone). We argue that, taken together, this evidence is consistent with the presence of implicit gender stereotypes as driving the observed differences in the way candidates are described. Keywords: Gender bias; Research institutions; Professional labor markets; Word embeddings (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:eecrev:v:180:y:2025:i:c:s0014292125002053 DOI: 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105155 Access Statistics for this article European Economic Review is currently edited by T.S. Eicher, A. Imrohoroglu, E. Leeper, J. Oechssler and M. Pesendorfer More articles in European Economic Review from Elsevier |
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