Family Ties, Geographic Mobility and the Gender Gap in Academic Aspirations

Lidia Farre and Francesc Ortega

No 14561, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper provides new evidence supporting that gender differences in post-graduate educational choices contribute to the glass ceiling in the labor market. We study the decision to pursue an advanced degree form an internationally renowned institution, which greatly facilitates access to top jobs. Relying on a unique dataset on applications to a highly selective program that provides merit-based graduate fellowships to Spanish students, we show that women apply for the fellowships at lower rates than observationally equivalent male graduates. We also implemented a large-scale survey on current college students and show that female college graduates have stronger family ties than males, which restricts their geographical mobility and has a negative effect on their educational aspirations. Importantly, the previous pattern is reversed in STEM fields: female graduates in STEM participate in the fellowship program at equal or higher rates than comparable males. In fact, we show that female STEM students originate from more educated families, have higher academic ability, and higher educational and earnings aspirations than women in other fields.

Keywords: geographic mobility; family ties; fellowships; post-graduate; gender (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J3 J7 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 56 pages
Date: 2021-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-gen, nep-isf, nep-soc and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published - published as 'Geographic mobility of college students and the gender gap in academic aspirations' in: Labour Economics, 2024, 90, 102550

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp14561.pdf (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:iza:izadps:dp14561

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 ().