Is More Better? Evaluating Interventions to Increase Female Students’ Interest in Economics

Ann L. Owen, Evelyn Skoy and Wei Zhan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, 2026, vol. 116, 692-696

Abstract: We implement a two-year randomized controlled trial in an introductory economics course at a liberal arts college to evaluate the impact of combining easy-to-implement interventions on students’ likelihood of taking additional economics courses. Interventions include a welcome email, gender-composition-manipulated required study groups, and an end-of-semester congratulatory email to students with median grades or higher. We find that any one intervention increases the probability that women, but not men, take additional economics courses, but more interventions do not increase effectiveness for individual students. However, heterogeneous effects imply that multiple interventions will be more effective when implemented for a group of students.

JEL-codes: A22 I23 I28 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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DOI: 10.1257/pandp.20261058

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