Challenging the intuition: Is a same-gender supervisor beneficial for doctoral students?

Abstract

It continues to be a puzzle that women are disproportionally often dropping out of academic careers. Researchers and policymakers have suggested that same-gender supervisors are important for tightening this 'leaky pipeline'. Especially in subjects with a strong overrepresentation of men, it seems likely that female supervisors work as positive role models and help preventing discrimination. Anticipating this effect, female doctoral students might also prefer supervisors of the same gender.Therefore, we ask how widespread a gender match is between doctoral student and supervisor in Germany and whether a gender match between supervisors and doctoral students is beneficial for the doctorate and for a possible scientific career thereafter. For our data we draw on the first survey of the 'German National Academics Panel Study (2018)'; to address causality concerns we apply entropy balancing for our estimations.Our analyses confirm that both female and male doctoral students are more likely to have a supervisor of the same gender. Furthermore, results show that female supervisors have a positive effect on satisfaction with mentoring and academic self-concept for both female and male doctoral students.