Gender, beauty and support networks in academia: evidence from a field experiment

Michal Krawczyk and Magdalena Smyk

No 2015-43, Working Papers from Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw

Abstract: Bibliometric studies show that male academics are more productive than their female counterparts and that the gap cannot be explained in terms of difference in abilities. In this project we wish to verify the hypothesis that this tendency is related to the greater support that men receive from their colleagues (“old boys network”). Towards this end we had e-mails sent by a male or female student asking academics for a minor favour. In Study 1 we asked authors of nearly 300 papers in experimental economics to share the raw data used in their study. We observed no difference in response rate or compliance rate between male and female senders. In Study 2 we sent 2775 e-mails to academics affiliated with prestigious schools from ten different fields , asking to either send us a copy of their recent article or meet the sender supposedly interested in pursuing a PhD program. Once again we manipulated gender of the senders but this time we also varied their physical attractiveness. We found a small but significant difference in the Article Treatment: attractive females’ requests were honoured less often. No such tendency was found in the Meeting Treatment and no general gender effect was observed. Overall, we find very little support for the claim that early-stage male researchers enjoy greater support than their female colleagues.

Keywords: gender; beauty; women in academia; field experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 17 pages
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-soc and nep-sog
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.wne.uw.edu.pl/index.php/download_file/2291/ First version, 2015 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Gender, beauty and support networks in academia: Evidence from a field experiment (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:war:wpaper:2015-43

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Marcin Bąba ().