Homophily in Advice Seeking

This paper investigates homophily in advice seeking. Using administrative data from an online college student mentoring platform, we document that female students are 28 percent more likely to reach out to female mentors relative to male students, conditional on various observable characteristics. This preference may be driven by differences in the advice given by female mentors, or it may result from female students using mentor gender as a proxy for other unobservable mentor characteristics. If this preference persists even when female mentors are scarce or have less desirable characteristics than their male counterparts, then it may result in less mentoring time or lower mentorship quality for female students. However, if there are large benefits from homophily in the quality of advice received, then female students may be better off making this tradeoff. Ultimately, it is theoretically ambiguous whether homophily hurts or improves the quality of mentorship received.

Even though female students prefer to interact with female mentors, the patterns from the online mentoring platform provide little evidence that female mentors offer higher quality mentorship. Female mentors are less likely than male mentors to respond to messages from both male and female students. Furthermore, relative to male mentors, female mentors’ responses to female students are shorter. These descriptive patterns call into question whether the benefits of homophily outweigh its costs.

To causally isolate homophily by gender in advice seeking, and shed light on its costs and benefits to students, we adapt a common methodology for estimating willingness-to-pay for product and job attributes. Specifically, we estimate college students’ preferences for mentor characteristics by implementing a hypothetical choice preference elicitation in a setting that incentivizes truthful responses. Students are shown pairs of hypothetical mentors’ profiles and asked to choose which mentor they prefer. We investigate whether female students' preference for female mentors is primarily driven by demand for advice that only female professionals can provide, or if it is because students use mentor gender as a proxy for other desirable characteristics, such as approachability. Specifically, in the preference elicitation, alongside the hypothetical mentor profiles, we provide information from a prior mentee (whose gender is randomized) on their experience with the mentor, including the extent to which the mentor was knowledgable about job opportunities, easy to talk to/friendly, and gave personalized advice.