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

Although it is widely supposed that a college's female undergraduate enrollment in the sciences and engineering can be increased by raising female representation on the faculties in those fields, that proposition has not been subjected to serious statistical analysis. The authors of this paper analyze panel data from three quite different educational institutions—Princeton University, the University of Michigan, and Whittier College—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. They find no evidence that an increase in the share of women on a department's faculty led to an increase in its share of female majors.