A Formula for Success

The soon-to-be-completed leadership succession at Xerox from Ann Mulcahy—a woman—to Ursula Burns—also a woman—is one for the record books. It will be the first woman-to-woman transition at a Fortune 500 company, and Burns is the first African-American woman to take the helm of any such corporation.

Mulcahy has balked [2] at the notion that the über-competent Burns needed her help—or anyone else's—in making her way through the ranks. Nonetheless, the paucity of women in senior positions who might in turn mentor young women on their way up the ladder is one of the primary reasons put forth [3] to explain the continued existence of the glass ceiling in corporate America. In science and technology, the situation is even bleaker—women are under-represented at every level, from advanced college classes to the executive suite, making Burns' rise from math major to CEO of tech giant Xerox all the more remarkable.

Of course, female mentorship is only one strand of a complex web of explanations—from aptitude [4] to temperament [5] to societal discrimination [6]—for the gender gap in science and elsewhere. A recent National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper on gender and academic achievement at the U.S. Air Force Academy, however, finds that the importance of female mentors may be even more powerful than previously thought. The study, by University of California-Davis economists [7] Scott Carrell [8] and Marianne Page [9] and their colleague James West at the Air Force Academy [10], finds that replacing a male instructor with a female one has such a strong effect on female achievement as to erase the gender gap entirely.

(Read the rest of this article [11] at Slate.com [12])