Does exposure to female role models increase leadership aspirations: a randomized experiment in civic involvement projects

Exploiting a quasi-natural experiment in civic involvement projects, we show that female aspirations for supervisor positions increase by four fold if the student has worked with a female supervisor in the past. CIP (Civic Involvement Project) is a required non-credit course at Sabanci University in which first-year students are required to choose a theme on which they will work for a year. Then students are put in small groups and randomly assigned to a supervisor. These random supervisor-student matches present a natural experiment we can use to test the effect of female role models. In a sample of 1066 CIP completers, we observe that those female students who were supervised by a female supervisor were four times more likely to become candidates for supervisor positions in the following year compared to those who were supervised by male supervisors. There was no sex effect on male student aspirations for supervisor positions.