Gender Gap in Admission Performance under Competitive Pressure

Stepan Jurajda and Daniel Münich

CERGE-EI Working Papers from The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague

Abstract: Do women perform worse than equally able men in stressful competitive settings? We ask this question for competitions with a high payoff---admissions to tuition-free selective universities. With data on an entire cohort of Czech students graduating from secondary schools and applying to universities, we show that, compared to men of similar general skills and subject-of-study preferences, women do not shy away from applying to more competitive programs and perform similarly well when competition is less intense, but perform substantially worse (are less likely to be admitted) when applying to very selective universities. This comparison holds even when controlling for unobservable skills

Keywords: Gender Gap in Performance; Test Anxiety; Competition; Admissions. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I29 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-lab
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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