09:30 - 11:10
P1-S20
Room: 1A.04
Chair/s:
Heiner Janus
Discussant/s:
Alicia Noëllie Saes-Louarn
Diversifying the Bureaucracy of Tomorrow: Role Models and the Educational Pipeline
P1-S20-1
Presented by: Josephine Arnfred
Josephine ArnfredAsmus Leth OlsenMerlin Schaeffer
University of Copenhagen
In Denmark, women make up nearly half of all public leaders. However, despite increasing diversity within the population, almost all of these female leaders are ethnically Danish. This underrepresentation of minorities poses challenges for Danish society, indicating that a growing segment of citizens are not represented adequately in the policy making process. Since public sector positions often require specialized education, it is crucial to increase the enrollment of minority students in university programs that lead to careers in public administration. Building on prior research highlighting successful strategies for minority recruitment (Linos et al., 2017) and theories emphasizing the role of shared identity, we design a field experiment to examine whether professionally produced role model videos can influence female minority high school students' interest in and application rates to a prestigious social science program that supply heavily to public management. The study involves nine professionally shot and scripted videos, featuring six minority women and three native Danish women, shown to 2,000 female high school students with a non-Western immigrant background. Using a between-subjects design with stimuli-sampled groups (majority vs. minority role models), the experiment unfolds in three phases: an initial survey incorporating the intervention and immediate outcomes, a follow-up survey, and finally, linkage of responses to Danish register data. This design enables us to assess how the intervention impacts educational choices in the years following the study and to assess to what extent role models can aid in diversifying the bureaucracy of tomorrow.
Keywords: field experiment, role models, bureaucracy, diversity, intersectionalism, women, ethnicity, experiments, public administration, public management

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