EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The Downside of Good Peers: How Classroom Composition Differentially Affects Men’s and Women’s STEM Persistence

Stefanie Fischer

No 1605, Working Papers from California Polytechnic State University, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper investigates whether class composition can help explain why women are disproportionately more likely to fall out of the “STEM†pipeline. Identification comes from a standardized enrollment process at a large public university that essentially randomly assigns freshmen to different mandatory introductory chemistry lectures. Using administrative data, I find that women who are enrolled in a class with higher ability peers are less likely to graduate with a STEM degree, while men’s STEM persistence is unaffected. The effect is largest for women in the bottom third of the ability distribution. I rule out that this is driven solely by grades.

Keywords: Higher Education; Gender; STEM; Classroom Composition Effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 I23 I24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 52 pages
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-lab and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yJY_2MiJuE6l6Xle2 ... /view?usp=drive_link First version, 2016 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpl:wpaper:1605

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from California Polytechnic State University, Department of Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Matthew Cole ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:cpl:wpaper:1605