Title

Following in Her Footsteps? Women's College Majors and Faculty Gender Composition

Author(s)

Brandice J. Canes Brandice Canes (Stanford University)

Harvey S. Rosen Harvey Rosen (Princeton University)

Abstract

It is frequently asserted that a college's female undergraduate enrollment in the sciences and engineering can be increased by raising female representation on the faculties in these areas. Despite the widespread acceptance of this proposition, it does not appear to have been subjected to any kind of serious statistical analysis. In this paper, we assemble panel data from three rather different educational institutions, and use them to examine the relationship between the gender composition of the students in an academic department and the gender composition of its faculty at the time the students were choosing their majors. We find no evidence for the conventional view that an increase in the share of females on a department's faculty leads to an increase in its share of female majors.

Creation Date

1993-10

Section URL ID

IRS

Paper Number

321

URL

https://dataspace.princeton.edu/bitstream/88435/dsp01sj139194t/1/321.pdf

File Function

Jel

C14

Keyword(s)

education, role model

Suppress

false

Series

1