Promoting Female Interest in Economics: Limits to Nudges

Todd Pugatch and Elizabeth Schroeder

No 13489, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Why is the proportion of women who study Economics so low? This study assesses whether students respond to messages about majoring in Economics, and whether this response varies by student gender. We conducted an experiment among more than 2,000 students enrolled in Economics Principles courses, with interventions proceeding in two phases. In the first phase, randomly assigned students received a message with basic information about the Economics major, or the basic message combined with an emphasis on the rewarding careers or financial returns associated with the major. A control group received no such messages. In the second phase, all students receiving a grade of B- or better received a message after the course ended encouraging them to major in Economics. For a randomly chosen subset of these students, the message also encouraged them to persist in Economics even if their grade was disappointing. The basic message increased the proportion of male students majoring in Economics by 2 percentage points, equivalent to the control mean. We find no significant effects for female students. Extrapolating to the full sample, the basic message would nearly double the male/female ratio among Economics majors. Our results suggest the limits of light-touch interventions to promote diversity in Economics.

Keywords: randomized control trial; nudges; higher education; gender gap in economics; college major choice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2020-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-sog
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Published - published in: American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings, 2021, 111, 123-127

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp13489.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Promoting Female Interest in Economics: Limits to Nudges (2021)
Working Paper: Promoting Female Interest in Economics: Limits to Nudges (2020)
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:iza:izadps:dp13489

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().