The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 1, 2010, Monday

The Chronicle of Higher Education

February 1, 2010, Monday

The Chronicle of Higher Education

Debating the Value of Mentors to Female Economists
By Mary Helen Miller

A female junior faculty member who has a mentor will receive more federal grants, publish more papers, and do so in top-tier journals than will a mentorless counterpart, says a working paper recently posted on the Web site of the National Bureau of Economic Research. But at least one critic points out that there may be alternative explanations for the apparent advantage.

The study, which the paper said was the first randomized trial of the effects of a mentorship program, compared different groups of female junior faculty members. A group of 126 women attended two-day mentorship workshops with other female junior and senior faculty members at the annual meetings of the American Economic Association in 2004, 2006, or 2008. Another group, of 91 women, did not participate in the workshops. (The authors plan to add two additional groups to the study in 2010 and 2012.)

The study found that five years after attending the sessions, the 2004 cohort exhibited "positive and significant effects of the workshop on grants, top-tier publication and total publications." Smaller but significant effects were found for the 2006 cohort. It was too early to see results for the 2008 cohort, the paper said.

Workshop participants were divided into groups of four to five participants and one or two mentors. The groups, comprising faculty members from various institutions, were assigned on the basis of research interests. The purpose of the workshops was to expose junior faculty members to role models, allow senior faculty members to provide information about getting tenure, and create peer networks among the junior faculty members.

Debate Over Cause and Effect
The paper represents an interim report on the mentorship program. While the report suggests that the workshops affected junior faculty members' performance, it concludes that any significant effect on whether women stay in academe or receive tenure has yet to be demonstrated.

Skeptics point out that the study did not really demonstrate cause and effect. Cathy A. Trower, research director at the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education, said that while she wants to believe that the mentorship workshops are effective, the study did not actually show that the participants maintained the networks they formed, or benefited from them. If the study had evidence of network continuity, she said, she would be more convinced of the workshops' effectiveness.

It is possible that the content of the workshops themselves, rather than any relationships that came out of them, might be responsible for the observed benefits, Ms. Trower said. "I think it's quite possible that these sessions help women's confidence and help them establish a network," she said.

Francine D. Blau, an author of the paper and a professor at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, said mentoring at the national level could be particularly helpful to women. Such relationships often develop informally, and sometimes they may develop more easily between faculty members of the same sex, she said. Because there are seldom a large number of female economists at any one institution, a workshop with women from other institutions could be beneficial, she said.

"This workshop was primarily designed to focus on the crucial tenure hurdle," Ms. Blau said. "We thought that if we could do a better job getting women through that stage, all women would benefit."

The other authors of the paper, all economics faculty members, are Janet M. Currie, of Columbia University; Rachel T.A. Croson, of the University of Texas at Dallas; and Donna K. Ginther, of the University of Kansas.