Replication Data for: Is Graduate School Worth It? Harassment and Graduate Student Satisfaction in Political Science

This paper investigates the dynamics of discrimination in Political Science PhD programs with a survey of current political science graduate students in the top 50 departments. We focus on mentorship, funding, sexual harassment, racism, homophobia, and labor exploitation: 20% of respondents report labor exploitation, 19% experienced racial discrimination, 9% report sexual harassment and 6% experienced homophobia. Discrimination is uneven across individuals: Some groups of graduate students experience widespread discrimination, especially racial discrimination, while other groups are largely unaware of these issues. We ran a survey experiment to gauge the impact of misconduct on formal reporting mechanisms and find that hearing about racial discrimination has a chilling effect on reporting. Importantly, we find that experiencing discrimination harms how satisfied students are in their programs. We find that factors linked to student vulnerability, like international status and funding, are significantly associated with harassment, and that reporting discrimination predicts more discrimination.