Inequalities in Becoming a Scholar: Race, Gender and Student-Advisor Relationships in Doctoral Education

Background: Extensive research has documented the importance of faculty advisors for graduate students’ experiences and outcomes. Recent research has begun to provide more nuanced accounts illuminating different dimensions of advisor support as well as attending to inequalities in students’ experiences with advisors. Purpose: We extend the research on graduate student advisor relationships in two important ways. First, building on the concept of social capital, and in particular the work on institutional agents, we illuminate specific benefits associated with student-advisor relationships. Second, we advance prior work on inequality in advisor relationships by examining students’ experiences at the intersection of race and gender. Research Design: To illuminate the nuances of graduate students’ experiences with advisors, this study included interviews with 79 students pursuing PhD’s in biological sciences. Thematic coding revealed several important dimensions of benefits associated with advisor relationships. Corresponding codes were grouped into three categories, describing three groups of students with notably different experiences with advisors. Findings: The data revealed three distinct student-advisor relationship profiles which we term scholars, subordinates, and marginals. The three groups had vastly different experiences with access to knowledge and resources, access to networks, and cultivation of independence. Moreover, the distribution across these three groups was highly unequal with unique patterns observed at the intersection of race and gender. White men benefited from both racial and gender privilege and were notably overrepresented in the scholars group while White women and racial/ethnic minority (REM) students were more likely to be socialized as subordinates. REM men had the least favorable experiences with the majority of them being in the marginal category, along with a substantial proportion of White and REM women. Notably, even experiences of negative relationships with advisors were gendered and raced: REM men’s negative relationships with advisors were characterized by “benign neglect” while women primarily experienced conflictual relationships. Conclusion and Recommendations: The findings illuminate important consequences of student-advisor relationships and pronounced inequalities in who has access to benefits accrued through those relationships. Creating more equitable experiences will necessitate substantial attention to improving mentoring and eliminating gender and racial/ethnic inequalities in faculty support.