We leverage variation in the timing of women's colleges' transitions to coeducation throughout the 1960s-2000s to study how exposure to a gendered social environment affects women's human capital investments. Applying event study and synthetic control analyses to newly collected historical data, we find that the share of women majoring in STEM at…

Women's colleges are currently struggling to remain solvent and germane to today's higher education landscape. Despite the struggles, women's colleges have provided inimitable, valuable, and engaging experiences for the students who enroll at these traditionally small, liberal arts focused institutions. As the small number of women entering STEM…

According to the World Economic Forum, the occupational gender gap with men dominating well-remunerated STEM careers is a key factor in the gender pay gap. However, the problem of underrepresentation of women in STEM fields is mitigated or reversed in some Eastern European and Islamic countries. This disparity suggests that cultural factors are at…

Single-sex schooling is believed to benefit students' academic achievement and girls' engagement in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM). The latter is assumed because single-sex environments are meant to neutralise gender stereotypes. Little is known, however, about longer term effects of such schooling. Therefore,…

Informal STEM education programs have become venues wherein girls can improve their sense of belonging and potential success (STEM identity) through interactions with role models and seeing how STEM fields are relevant to them. Despite decades of advocacy for single-sex programs' role in improving girls' STEM identity, few studies have found…

In the present day, it is not uncommon for there to be a class full of engineering students with very few women among them. To combat this lack of gender diversity, colleges and universities have employed outreach programs and developed summer engagement opportunities that allow women to explore engineering before they graduate high school. The…

African American and Black women are twice as likely to enroll in higher education in comparison to Black men. However, when it comes to engineering degrees awarded in 2015, only 24% of the Black recipients were women. A potential solution may be to introduce engineering to pre-college Black female students through extracurricular program. Being…

Science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) are subjects comprising knowledge whose schooling is essential for every country striving after long-term economic success. Despite the already existing shortage of skilled labour within the mathematic-technical-scientific professional field, men still dominate the respective subjects and…

The purpose of this study was to expand on the current research pertaining to women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors, better understand the experiences of undergraduate women in the sciences, identify barriers to female persistence in their intended STEM majors, and understand the impact of the STEM co-educational…

Using data from the 2004-2007 National Study of Living Learning Programs, the only national dataset offering longitudinal information on outcomes associated with living-learning (L/L) program participation, this study investigated the role of L/L programs and other college environments in the professional outcome expectations of women in science,…