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ERIC Number: ED610397
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 2020-Nov
Pages: 63
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
When Sarah Meets Lawrence: The Effect of Coeducation on Women's Major Choices. Working Papers. WR-A1060-1
Calkins, Avery; Binder, Ariel J.; Shaat, Dana; Timpe, Brenden
RAND Corporation
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 newly coeducational colleges declined by 2.0 percentage points (24%) after ten years of coeducation. Coeducation induced a large increase in the male share of the student body, but did not measurably influence the male share of faculty, capacity constraints or the ability composition of female students. A simple extrapolation of our main estimate suggests that gendered peer effects can account for 34% of the gender gap in STEM majoring. These findings support the hypothesis that non-pecuniary factors, related to social norms and gender roles, shape gender gaps in major choice.
RAND Corporation. P.O. Box 2138, Santa Monica, CA 90407-2138. Tel: 877-584-8642; Tel: 310-451-7002; Fax: 412-802-4981; e-mail: order@rand.org; Web site: http://www.rand.org
Publication Type: Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) (NIH); University of Michigan
Authoring Institution: RAND Education and Labor
Identifiers - Location: New York
Grant or Contract Numbers: T32HD007339; P2CHD041028