Does Scarcity of Female Instructors Create Demand for Diversity among Students? Evidence from an M-Turk Experiment

Scarcity of female academics has been well documented for math-intensive or STEM fields. We investigate whether a lack of female instructors creates a demand for diversity on the student side. In an incentivized instructor-choice experiment on MTurk, we experimentally vary the gender balancedness of the instructor pool and let participants choose one additional instructor among one male and one female. We find that participants value diversity when female instructors are scarce. The effect is statistically significant for women but not for men, and these gender differences get further amplified when we restrict the attention to a sub-sample of participants who made a more meditated choice. Women also appreciate diversity, when scarcity concerns the opposite sex - in contrast to men, who value diversity only when the scarce gender is their own.