Sex and Science: How Professor Gender Perpetuates the Gender Gap

Scott Carrell, Marianne Page and James West

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2010, vol. 125, issue 3, 1101-1144

Abstract: Why aren't there more women in science? This paper begins to shed light on this question by exploiting data from the U.S. Air Force Academy, where students are randomly assigned to professors for a wide variety of mandatory standardized courses.We focus on the role of professor gender. Our results suggest that although professor gender has little impact on male students, it has a powerful effect on female students' performance in math and science classes, and high-performing female students' likelihood of taking future math and science courses, and graduating with a STEM degree. The estimates are largest for students whose SAT math scores are in the top 5% of the national distribution. The gender gap in course grades and STEM majors is eradicated when high-performing female students are assigned to female professors in mandatory introductory math and science coursework.

Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (353)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1162/qjec.2010.125.3.1101 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Sex and Science: How Professor Gender Perpetuates the Gender Gap (2009)
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:oup:qjecon:v:125:y:2010:i:3:p:1101-1144.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().