Mind The Gap: The Impact of the Gender Composition of College STEM Courses on STEM Degree Completion
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Peer effects within classrooms are powerful as they can lead to a more optimal distribution of peers, thus improving educational outcomes, creating more efficient human capital investments, and promoting macroeconomic growth. I attempt to measure gender peer effects within STEM education by employing a strategy that exploits variation in STEM interest among females across cohorts within a particular school as a source of idiosyncratic variation. To measure the effect of gender composition within a STEM classroom on the probability that a student graduates with a STEM degree, I instrument the gender composition of a classroom on the share of women in that cohort who expressed an interest in STEM prior to their freshman year of college. I find that there are indeed gender peer effects in STEM education: a 10 percent increase in the proportion of females within a STEM cohort leads to a 7.77 percent increase in the share of females and a 5.52 percent decrease in the share of males graduating with a STEM degree. I also extend my analysis to examine the effect within certain racial groups and fields of study and find statistically significant results varying in magnitude and direction. I also find evidence that gender peer effects in STEM classrooms are non-linear: both men and women in STEM classrooms with a below-median female share are 32.67-33.24 percent more likely to graduate with a degree in STEM when there is a 10 percent increase in the female share of the classroom.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | June 2, 2022 |
| Date modified | December 5, 2022 |
| Publication date | June 8, 2022; June 2, 2022 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Yan, Shannon | |
|---|---|---|
| Thesis advisor | Hoxby, Caroline | |
| Degree granting institution | Stanford University, Department of Economics |
Subjects
| Subject | Gender Gap |
|---|---|
| Subject | Classroom Peer Effects |
| Subject | STEM Education |
| Genre | Text |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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- Use and reproduction
- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred citation
- Yan, S. (2022). Mind The Gap: The Impact of the Gender Composition of College STEM Courses on STEM Degree Completion. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/xd245zj6456
Collection
Stanford University, Department of Economics, Honors Theses
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- Contact
- shannon.yan1@gmail.com
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