Does scarcity of female instructors create demand for diversity among students? Evidence from an M-Turk experiment

Abstract

Scarcity of female scholars has been well documented for math-intensive or STEM fields. We investigate whether a lack of female instructors creates a demand for gender diversity on the student side. In an incentivized instructor-choice experiment on MTurk, we experimentally vary the gender balancedness of the instructor pool and ask participants to choose one additional instructor among one male and one female. We find that participants value gender diversity when female instructors are scarce. The effect is statistically significant for women but not for men. We also test for the effect of male scarcity in the instructor pool and find that both, men and women, show a demand for gender diversity.