What's In A Mentor?: Assistant Professor Yana Gallen Explores Gender Bias in Mentorship

Do mentees prefer to have mentors of the same gender? New research from Assistant Professor Yana Gallen, labor economist and assistant professor at Harris, investigates the ways mentors and mentees are paired and exactly what values mentees prioritize in a mentor.

“Does Information Affect Homophily?,” a working paper from the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics at UChicago, specifically investigates how the tendency to associate with those similar to oneself – officially termed “homophily” – can be counteracted by other information when choosing mentors.

Gallen and coauthor Melanie Wasserman from the UCLA Anderson School of Management, provide a great number of examples of peoples’ innate tendency to associate with people of the same gender: Women may wait longer to see a female doctor as opposed to seeing an available male doctor, for example.

In the context of mentorship, which Gallen’s paper explores, the concept of homophily may play into identities other than gender. Programs are built around an effort to find specific identity-based mentors, including mentorship opportunities for women in STEM, or first-generation college students, for instance.

Gallen and Wasserman’s research looks into how willing students may be to sacrifice other qualities in a mentor – geographic proximity, say, or occupational match – in order to have a mentor of the same gender.

When provided only basic information about a mentor, including gender, occupation, and years of experience, female students were willing to trade a male mentor with more relevant experience for a female mentor with less. (Male students, meanwhile did not express as dramatic a preference.)

When provided with more information about the quality of the mentors, however, the gender preference disappeared. Regardless of gender, students were no longer willing to pay a cost to choose a less qualified female mentor over a more qualified male mentor.

This realization has significant implications for how mentorship programs can be structured.

“If homophily is driven by lack of information on mentor quality,” Gallen and Wasserman say, “then resources could be better invested recruiting mentors based on quality rather than shared trait.”

Beyond the benefits of improving mentorship programs, this research can lead to refining other processes as well. By rethinking how matching-providers are formulated, organizations can save time and money while producing better outcomes.

“Initiatives that commonly use shared traits as a coarse proxy for match quality—while well intentioned—could lead to efficiency losses relative to those that incorporate information on valued traits into the matching process,” Gallen and Wasserman write.