Disconnecting women: gender disparities in the impact of online instruction

Xiaoyue Shan, Ulf Zölitz and Uschi Backes-Gellner

No 474, ECON - Working Papers from Department of Economics - University of Zurich

Abstract: We study the impact of online instruction with a field experiment that randomly assigns 1,344 university students to different proportions of online and in-person lectures in multiple introductory courses. Increased online instruction leaves men’s exam performance unaffected but significantly lowers women’s performance, particularly in math-intensive courses. Online instruction also reduces women’s longer-run performance and increases their study dropout. Exploring mechanisms, we find that women exposed to more online lectures report greater difficulty in connecting with peers, less engaging instructors, and lower course satisfaction. Our findings suggest that shifting toward more online instruction may disproportionally harm women.

Keywords: Online instruction; field experiment; gender disparities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 I23 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-07
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/279463/1/econwp474.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:zur:econwp:474

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ECON - Working Papers from Department of Economics - University of Zurich Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Severin Oswald ().