Understanding the impact of gender and migration on high-ability students’ behavior: Exploring behavioral differences in business, law, and engineering students throughout their academic careers

Lisa Beck-Werz (), Bernd Frick (), Thomas Fritz () and Fabian Lensing ()
Additional contact information
Lisa Beck-Werz: University of Paderborn
Bernd Frick: University of Paderborn
Thomas Fritz: FH Aachen University of Applied Sciences
Fabian Lensing: University of Paderborn

No 83, Working Papers Dissertations from Paderborn University, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics

Abstract: Using a large sample with detailed information on 32,296 high-ability business, law, and engineering students, we explore gender- and migration-related differences in behaviour to better understand the persistent under-representation of women and migrants in the executive suites of German companies. Since in this homogenous group of ‘high-achievers‘, students are quite similar in their intellectual abilities, observable differences in behaviour can be mainly attributed to differences in gender- and migration-related preference patterns. We find that irrespective of migration background, men are more likely to pursue activities that increase their human capital, such as completing a doctorate, while women tend to engage in lower-level temporary jobs and complete their studies faster. In contrast, in this selective sample of high-ability students, migration background has a marginal effect on students’ behaviour only. Perhaps most surprising, we find that the behaviour of women with a migration background – who potentially face ‘double discrimination‘ – is not different from that of their male peers.

Keywords: High-ability students; higher education, gender gap; migration; education; intersectionality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I23 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37
Date: 2022-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://groups.uni-paderborn.de/wp-wiwi/RePEc/pdf/dispap/DP83.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:pdn:dispap:83

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers Dissertations from Paderborn University, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by WP-WiWi-Info ().