Discrimination against Pre-PhD Students

Our target group is contacted, and we measure early-career everyday discrimination towards potential future researchers.

Researchers (professors and postdocs) in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland receive an email by a student whose name signals either a male or female gender and who either expresses interest in future research or not.

2026-06-02

2026-06-16

Response rate in the survey.

Dummy variable which is equal to one if the researcher has participated in the survey, (i.e. clicked on the survey link in the email / opened link in the browser), and zero otherwise.
For this variable, it does not matter which or how many answers have been provided in the survey.

Effort Provision
We will repeat the analyses for the primary outcome variable for this secondary outcome.

Number of answers provided in the survey.
We count the provision of consent as the first answer. If a researcher actively chooses the option to not provide consent, their “effort provision” will be equal to one. Subjects can answer 7 questions (including consent provision) in Part 1 of the survey and 110 questions in Part 2. Hence, the maximum number of answers is 117. The number of answers can be zero even if the researcher has participated in the survey (by clicking on the link but not answering the question on consent). If a researcher participates multiple times in the survey, we will consider participation with the maximum number of answers as the one relevant to measure their effort provision.

See experimental design (hidden)

# Sample
We manually compiled a database of professors and postdoctoral researchers in the fields of business administration and economics at universities in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. For all researchers, we collected their type of position (tenured vs. non-tenured), gender, and email addresses. Tenured researchers include full professors and associate professors. Non-tenured researchers include assistant professors and postdoctoral researchers. We define postdoctoral researchers as individuals who have received a PhD but are not (yet) professors.

Our final sample is based on these online references and includes the following universities:

Austria:
https://www.oesterreich.gv.at/de/themen/bildung_und_ausbildung/hochschulen/universitaet/Seite.160302 [Accessed on 29th of May, 2026]

- Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt
- Johannes Kepler Universität Linz
- Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz
- Montanuniversität Leoben
- Paris-Lodron-Universität Salzburg
- Technische Universität Graz
- Technische Universität Wien
- Universität für Weiterbildung Krems (Donau-Universität Krems)
- Universität Innsbruck
- Universität Wien
- Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien

Switzerland:
https://www.swissuniversities.ch/themen/lehre-studium/akkreditierte-schweizer-hochschulen [Accessed on 29th of May, 2026]

• Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne EPFL
• Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich ETH
• Università della Svizzera italiana USI
• Universität Basel
• Universität Bern UniBE
• Universität Luzern Unilu
• Universität St. Gallen HSG
• Universität Zürich UZH
• Université de Fribourg Unifr
• Université de Genève UNIGE
• Université de Lausanne UNIL
• Université de Neuchâtel UniNE

Germany:
https://www.hochschulkompass.de/hochschulen/downloads.html [Accessed on29th of May, 2026]
• Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg im Breisgau
• Bard College Berlin, A Liberal Arts University
• Bergische Universität Wuppertal
• Brandenburgische Technische Universität Cottbus-Senftenberg
• Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg
• Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel
• Deutsche Sporthochschule Köln
• Deutsche Universität für Verwaltungswissenschaften Speyer
• Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen
• EBS Universität für Wirtschaft und Recht
• ESCP Europe Wirtschaftshochschule Berlin e.V.
• ESMT European School of Management and Technology
• Europa-Universität Flensburg
• Europa-Universität Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder)
• FernUniversität in Hagen
• Frankfurt School of Finance & Management
• Freie Universität Berlin
• Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
• Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
• Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universität Hannover
• HafenCity Universität Hamburg
• Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
• Helmut-Schmidt-Universität/Universität der Bundeswehr Hamburg
• Hertie School Berlin
• HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management
• Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
• Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main
• Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
• Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg
• Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen
• Karlsruher Institut für Technologie
• Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt
• Kühne Logistics University - Wissenschaftliche Hochschule für Logistik und Unternehmensführung
• Leuphana Universität Lüneburg
• Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
• Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg
• Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg
• Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg
• Philipps-Universität Marburg
• Private Universität Witten/Herdecke gGmbH
• Private Universität Witten/Herdecke gGmbH
• Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn
• Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen
• Rheinland-Pfälzische Technische Universität Kaiserslautern-Landau
• Ruhr-Universität Bochum
• Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg
• Technische Universität Bergakademie Freiberg
• Technische Universität Berlin
• Technische Universität Braunschweig
• Technische Universität Chemnitz
• Technische Universität Clausthal
• Technische Universität Darmstadt
• Technische Universität Dortmund
• Technische Universität Dresden
• Technische Universität Hamburg
• Technische Universität Ilmenau
• Technische Universität München
• Technische Universität Nürnberg
• Universität Augsburg
• Universität Bayreuth
• Universität Bielefeld
• Universität Bremen
• Universität der Bundeswehr München
• Universität des Saarlandes
• Universität Duisburg-Essen
• Universität Erfurt
• Universität Greifswald
• Universität Hamburg
• Universität Hildesheim
• Universität Hohenheim
• Universität Kassel
• Universität Koblenz
• Universität Konstanz
• Universität Leipzig
• Universität Mannheim
• Universität Münster
• Universität Osnabrück
• Universität Paderborn
• Universität Passau
• Universität Potsdam
• Universität Regensburg
• Universität Rostock
• Universität Siegen
• Universität Stuttgart
• Universität Trier
• Universität Ulm
• Universität Vechta
• Universität zu Köln
• Universität zu Lübeck
• WHU - Otto Beisheim School of Management
• Zeppelin Universität - Hochschule zwischen Wirtschaft, Kultur und Politik

# Exclusion Criteria

We exclude:
• postdoctoral researchers on a permanent position, i.e. “Akademischer Rat” in German (as far as detectable),
• honorary professors,
• adjunct professors,
• emeritus professors,
• lecturers,
• guest researchers,
• research fellows,
• researchers whose personal email address was not publicly available (10).
• and researchers in our sample that are involved in our study, e.g. co-author or PhD supervisor (8).

Students will not contact researchers from their own institution to minimize the risk that researchers become aware of the experiment.


# Survey invitation procedure

All researchers in our database will receive email invitations to participate in a survey on the changing importance of competencies in times of AI The email explains that the resulting report is part of a student research project.

Emails will be sent by 18 Master students who study and/or work as student assistants at the University of Cologne, Mannheim University, or Ruhr-University Bochum. Some of the students will contribute to writing the report so that the request for support is non-deceptive. We have recruited six (three male, three female) students from each university.

Each researcher will receive only one email.

# Experimental manipulation

The invitation email varies between two dimensions:
1. Student gender (male or female)
2. Expression of interest in pursuing a PhD (yes vs. no information)

Student gender will be identifiable through:
• the email address,
• the name stated in the first sentence of the email,
• the signature at the end of the email,
• the survey introduction page, and
• the survey footer.

These elements ensure that the student’s gender remains salient throughout participation in the survey.

Within students, we will vary whether they express interest in pursuing a PhD or not in the invitation email.

#Logistics

All 18 students from the three universities will send the emails on one afternoon on June 02, 2026. They will use email addresses in the format “firstname.lastname@...”. Data collection will end two weeks after the emails are sent, i.e. on June 16, 2026.

# Planned Analyses

We will study average treatment (male vs female sender) effects across all email recipients and examine heterogeneity with respect to recipients’ gender and tenure status (permanent/non-permanent position), and the combination of all of them. We will also analyze the within-sender variation of expressing interest in doing a PhD.

We will repeat these analyses with the subset of i) researchers in economics and ii) researchers in business administration, iii) private, and iv) public universities.

In all regressions we will control for the sender’s affiliation (University of Cologne, University Mannheim or Ruhr-University Bochum).

Randomization is done in python using stochatreat. We stratify the list of researchers into four strata:
1) Gender (Female/Male),
2) Field (Economics/Business Administration),
3) Country (Germany, Switzerland, Austria), and
4) Type of Position (Tenured/Non-Tenured).

Randomization is done in 2 steps.

1) All researchers, excluding those who are employed at the University of Cologne, University of Mannheim or Ruhr-University Bochum, will be randomized into 36 groups as described above.
2) For each of the excluded universities in step 1 separately, we randomly allocate the researchers into 24 groups as described above.
3) We combine the groups of steps 1 and 2 to have 36 groups in total. Each student will contact researchers of two groups, with none of the groups containing researchers from their own university. To one of their groups, they will send emails including the expression of interest in doing a PhD. To the other group, they will send emails without that addition.

Receiver of the email

No

Treatment is not clustered

The number of observations corresponds to the number of professors and postdoctoral researchers whose emails we have collected. Our final sample contains 4472 researchers and their email addresses.

We will randomly send each researcher one email which is i) either sent by a man or a woman and ii) indicates interest in pursuing a PhD or not.

9 male students and 9 female students will send the emails. Our sample contains 1375 female and 3097 male researchers.

See below for the sample sizes in the treatment arms:

Male Sender:
- PhD Interest Mail & Male Researcher: 769 researchers/ planned emails
- Mail w/o PhD Interest & Male Researcher: 776 researchers/planned emails
- PhD Interest Mail & Female Researcher: 347 researchers/planned emails
- Mail w/o PhD Interest & Female Researcher: 333 researchers/planned emails

Female Sender:
- PhD Interest Mail & Male Researcher: 783 researchers/planned emails
- Mail w/o PhD Interest & Male Researcher: 769 researchers/planned emails
- PhD Interest Mail & Female Researcher: 343 researchers/planned emails
- Mail w/o PhD Interest & Female Researcher: 352 researchers/planned emails