ERIC Number: ED532861
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 2012-Jun
Pages: 52
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Do Professors Really Perpetuate the Gender Gap in Science? Evidence from a Natural Experiment in a French Higher Education Institution. CEE DP 138
Breda, Thomas; Ly, Son Thierry
Centre for the Economics of Education (NJ1)
Stereotypes, role models played by teachers and social norms influence girls' academic self-concept and push girls to choose humanities rather than science. Do recruiters reinforce this strong selection by discriminating more against girls in more scientific subjects? Using the entrance exam of a French higher education institution (the Ecole Normale Superieure) as a natural experiment, we show the opposite: discrimination goes in favor of females in more male-connoted subjects (e.g. math, philosophy) and in favor of males in more female-connoted subjects (e.g. literature, biology), inducing a rebalancing of sex ratios between students recruited for a research career in science and humanities majors. We identify discrimination by systematic differences in students' scores between oral tests (non-blind toward gender) and anonymous written tests (blind toward gender). By making comparisons of these oral/written scores differences between different subjects for a given student, we are able to control both for a student's ability in each subject and for her overall ability at oral exams. The mechanisms likely to drive this positive discrimination toward the minority gender are also discussed. (Contains 15 tables, 3 figures and 33 footnotes.)
Descriptors: Majors (Students), Higher Education, Females, Gender Discrimination, Humanities, Gender Differences, Science Education, College Faculty, Foreign Countries, Scores, Science Tests, Disproportionate Representation, College Preparation, Masculinity, Males, Femininity, Mathematics Education, Social Sciences
Centre for the Economics of Education. London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, UK. Tel: +44-20-7955-7673; Fax: +44-20-7955-7595; e-mail: cee@lse.ac.uk; Web site: http://cee.lse.ac.uk
Publication Type: Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: High Schools; Higher Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: London School of Economics & Political Science, Centre for the Economics of Education
Identifiers - Location: France
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A