Do Professors Really Perpetuate the Gender Gap in Science? Evidence from a Natural Experiment in a French Higher Education Institution

Thomas Breda and Son Thierry Ly

CEE Discussion Papers from Centre for the Economics of Education, LSE

Abstract: Stereotypes, role models played by teachers and social norms influence girls' academic self-concept and push girls to choose humanities rather than science. Do recruiters reinforce this strong selection by discriminating more against girls in more scientific subjects? Using the entrance exam of a French higher education institution (the Ecole Normale Supérieure) as a natural experiment, we show the opposite: discrimination goes in favor of females in more male-connoted subjects (e.g. math, philosophy) and in favor of males in more female-connoted subjects (e.g. literature, biology), inducing a rebalancing of sex ratios between students recruited for a research career in science and humanities majors. We identify discrimination by systematic differences in students' scores between oral tests (non-blind toward gender) and anonymous written tests (blind toward gender). By making comparisons of these oral/written scores differences between different subjects for a given student, we are able to control both for a student's ability in each subject and for her overall ability at oral exams. The mechanisms likely to drive this positive discrimination toward the minority gender are also discussed.

Keywords: discrimination; gender stereotypes; natural experiment; sex and science (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I23 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-edu and nep-lab
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:ceedps:0138

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