Depressing fact of the day: Professors are less likely to reply to emails from women and minorities

In our experiment, professors were contacted by fictional prospective students seeking to discuss research opportunities before applying to a doctoral program.

Students’ names were randomly assigned to signal gender and race, but messages were otherwise identical.

Faculty ignored requests from women and minorities at a higher rate than requests from Caucasian males, particularly in higher-paying disciplines and private institutions. 

A new paper by Milkman, Akinola, and Chugh.

The most surprising sentence in the paper, to me: “Sixty-seven percent of the emails sent to faculty from prospective doctoral students elicited a response.” I would have guessed 10%. I mean, most professors barely respond to my emails.

34 Responses

  1. I am shocked. SHOCKED. More than 50% agreed to meet. I am pretty sure my advisors left TOWN if I tried to arrange a meeting…

  2. This kind of research using deception should be banned. You’re wasting people’s time (or worse) in a massive scale, especially because it is getting trendy. If many people do this kind of research, for example, fewer professors/employers/legislators/etc. will respond to emails from people because who knows if the email is an experiment or not. But you can’t tell other researchers “it’s OK for us to do this, but you shouldn’t do what we did; it’ll harm the society if you followed our suit.”