One of the most critical sources of socio-economic inequality is represented by educational attainment. It is likely to foster long-term effects on a wide set of outcomes including income, wealth, and health. Underrepresented minorities by gender and race are more likely to have lower educational performance than non-minority students. STEM fields (Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) offer very promising careers, better hiring prospects, and substantial salary premiums. According to OECD (2019) data, in member countries, fewer than 1 in 3 engineering graduates and fewer than 1 in 5 computer science graduates are females, which is frequently due to stereotypes and expectations, rather than performance differences in math and science. University instructors and lecturers are likely to provide decisive role models and this is especially true in the case of female or ethnic minority students in STEM fields. The first aim of this research project is to explore interactions of minority students with the same minority lecturers and instructors in a vast array of STEM courses at the Sapienza University of Rome. The project will assess to what extent exposure to the same minority instructor impacts students¿ performance in STEM disciplines. In order to circumvent the issue of possible self-selection of students to courses and instructors, the project is set to exploit an uncommon assignment method of students to instructors based on the mechanism of ¿canalizzazione¿, where students are allocated to different instructors based on the initial of their surname, constituting a random assignment mechanism. The second aim of the project is to set up a randomized field experiment to test if de-biasing outreach letters sent via e-mail to randomly selected students representing the aforementioned minorities containing the information about the carrier prospects have an impact on their academic outcomes.
