This paper investigates gender gaps in long-term career expectations and outcomes of PhD candidates in economics. For this purpose, we match rich survey data on PhD candidates (from the 2008-2010 job market cohorts) to public data on job histories and publication records through 2022. We document four novel empirical facts: (1) there is a robust gender gap in career expectations, with females about 10 percentage points less likely to ex-ante expect to get tenure or publish regularly; (2) the gender gap in expectations is remarkably similar to the gap observed for academic outcomes; (3) expectations are similarly predictive of outcomes for males and females. In addition, the predictive power of expectations does not differ by the relationship status of the individual; and (4) gender gaps in expectations can explain about 19% and 13% of the ex-post gaps in tenure and publications, respectively.
Authors
- Acknowledgements & Disclosure
- This research was supported in part by an NIA training grant to the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan (T32AG000221). We thank Yiran Fan and Dave Boudia for their excellent research assistance. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.3386/w32446
- Published in
- United States of America
Table of Contents
- Introduction 3
- Data 5
- The Job Seekers' Survey 6
- Outcomes Data 7
- Sample Description 8
- Empirical Results 10
- Expectations and Outcomes 10
- Do Expectations Predict Outcomes? 12
- Do Expectation Differences Explain Gender Gaps in Outcomes? 13
- Individually Preferred Outcomes 13
- Robustness 15
- Timing of Expectation Elicitation 15
- Academic Placement 15
- Relationship Timing 16
- Conclusion 17
- Supplementary Tables 26
- Data Cleaning and Definitions 29
- Job Seekers Survey 29
- About the Survey 29
- Data Cleaning 29
- Control Variables 30
- Missing Controls 33
- Multiple Job Market Participants 34
- Data Collection 34
- Outcome Definitions 36
- Publishing 36
- Tenure 36
- Subsample Analysis 40
- Analysis with relationship status measured at time of job market 42
