To support this interpretation, we – among other things – provide evidence of gender homophily in advisor-advisee relationships. Even controlling for department-year-field fixed effects, we find that female students are 50% more likely to have a female advisor compared to male students.

Still, placements are not of equal “quality". Females are missing from the top-ranked institutions, while males fill lower ranked positions.

3. For male students, we find what looks like a zero-sum game: affected males publish more and are more likely to stay in academia.

2. The fall in publications of female students is matched with a fall in the probability of being placed in academia of 9.8%-points (20% of the sample mean).

1. Female PhD students in their 3rd year at the time a female prof goes on leave publish much less in the five years after getting their PhD, declining 33% relative to the sample mean.

We study the effect of female professors' sabbaticals using a novel dataset on close to all 1998-2015 advisors-advisee relationships and early-career outcomes of top-50 PhD students. Here are our 3 main results ⬇️

Given the lack of female professors, a single woman missing translates into an average decline of 40% in the no of female professors present during the leave year!

**New working paper**

How does the under-representation of females in Economics affect the career trajectory of female Ph.D. students?

Sahar Parsa and I look at this in a new working paper by exploring sabbatical leaves taken by female professors at top-50 US Econ departments.