Gender peer effects in university: Evidence from a randomized experiment

Hessel Oosterbeek and Reyn Van Ewijk

No 35, Working Papers from Top Institute for Evidence Based Education Research

Abstract: Recent studies for primary and secondary education find positive effects of the share of girls in the classroom on achievement of boys and girls. This study examines whether these results can be extrapolated to post-secondary education. We conduct an experiment in which the shares of girls in workgroups for first year students in economics and business are manipulated and students are randomly assigned to these groups. Boys tend to postpone their dropout decision when surrounded by more girls, and there is also a modest reduction in early absenteeism. On the other hand, boys perform worse on courses with high math content when assigned to a group with many girls. Overall, however, we fail to find substantial gender peer effects on achievement. This in spite of the fact that students in groups with many girls help each other more often and study together more often.

Keywords: Field experiment; Peer effects; University students (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tierweb.nl/assets/files/UvA/boysgirls2010july2.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www.tierweb.nl:80 (A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.)

Related works:
Journal Article: Gender peer effects in university: Evidence from a randomized experiment (2014)
Working Paper: Gender Peer Effects in University: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment (2010)
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:tir:wpaper:35

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Top Institute for Evidence Based Education Research
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jessica Segal ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).