When Sarah Meets Lawrence: The Effects of Coeducation on Women's College Major Choices

Avery Calkins, Ariel Binder, Dana Shaat and Brenden Timpe

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2023, vol. 15, issue 3, 1-34

Abstract: We leverage variation in the adoption of coeducation by US women's colleges to study how exposure to a mixed-gender collegiate environment affects women's human capital investments. Our event-study analyses of newly collected historical data find a 3.0–3.5 percentage point (30–33 percent) decline in the share of women majoring in STEM fields. While coeducation caused a large influx of male peers and a modest increase in male faculty, we find no evidence that it altered the composition of the female student body or other gender-neutral inputs. Extrapolation of our main estimate suggests that coeducational environments explain 36 percent of the current gender gap in STEM majors.

JEL-codes: I23 I26 J16 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/app.20210692 (application/pdf)
https://doi.org/10.3886/E172621V1 (text/html)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/app.20210692.appx (application/pdf)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/app.20210692.slds (application/pdf)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/app.20210692.ds (application/zip)
Access to full text is restricted to AEA members and institutional subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: When Sarah Meets Lawrence: The Effects of Coeducation on Women's College Major Choices (2022)
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:aea:aejapp:v:15:y:2023:i:3:p:1-34

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/subscriptions

DOI: 10.1257/app.20210692

Access Statistics for this article

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics is currently edited by Alexandre Mas

More articles in American Economic Journal: Applied Economics from American Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael P. Albert ().