Nevertheless She Persisted? Gender Peer Effects in Doctoral STEM Programs

Valerie Bostwick and Bruce Weinberg

Journal of Labor Economics, 2022, vol. 40, issue 2, 397 - 436

Abstract: We study the effects of peer gender composition in STEM doctoral programs on persistence and degree completion. Leveraging unique new data and quasi-random variation in gender composition across cohorts within programs, we show that women entering cohorts with no female peers are 11.7 percentage points less likely to graduate within 6 years than their male counterparts. A 1 standard deviation increase in the percentage of female students differentially increases women’s probability of on-time graduation by 4.4 percentage points. These gender peer effects function primarily through changes in the probability of dropping out in a PhD program’s first year.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/714921 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/714921 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

Related works:
Working Paper: Nevertheless She Persisted? Gender Peer Effects in Doctoral STEM Programs (2018)
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:ucp:jlabec:doi:10.1086/714921

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Labor Economics from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().