Teaching accreditation exams reveal grading biases favor women in male-dominated disciplines in France

Thomas Breda () and Mélina Hillion
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Mélina Hillion: CREST - Centre de Recherche en Économie et Statistique - ENSAI - Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Analyse de l'Information [Bruz] - X - École polytechnique - IP Paris - Institut Polytechnique de Paris - ENSAE Paris - École Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Économique - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, PSE - Paris School of Economics - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École nationale des ponts et chaussées - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement

PSE-Ecole d'économie de Paris (Postprint) from HAL

Abstract: Discrimination against women is seen as one of the possible causes behind their underrepresentation in certain STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subjects. We show that this is not the case for the competitive exams used to recruit almost all French secondary and postsecondary teachers and professors. Comparisons of oral non–gender-blind tests with written gender-blind tests for about 100,000 individuals observed in 11 different fields over the period 2006–2013 reveal a bias in favor of women that is strongly increasing with the extent of a field's male-domination. This bias turns from 3 to 5 percentile ranks for men in literature and foreign languages to about 10 percentile ranks for women in math, physics, or philosophy. These findings have implications for the debate over what interventions are appropriate to increase the representation of women in fields in which they are currently underrepresented.

Keywords: Discrimination; Woman (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-07
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-01379340v1
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Published in Science, 2016, 353, pp.474-478. ⟨10.1126/science.aaf4372⟩

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Related works:
Working Paper: Teaching accreditation exams reveal grading biases favor women in male-dominated disciplines in France (2016)
Working Paper: Teaching Accreditation Exams Reveal Grading Biases Favor Women in Male-Dominated Disciplines in France (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:pseptp:halshs-01379340

DOI: 10.1126/science.aaf4372

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