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Title: Essays on Gender and Education

Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis

Publication Year: 2020

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Abstract: This dissertation focuses on the reasons why men and women make different choices when it comes to investing in human capital. The common thread of all three essays is a focus on one particular dimension of the human capital investment decision: the choice of college major. I study gender differences in college major choice in three different contexts. The first, the dot-com crash, is a large negative shock to the relative payoffs of different college majors. The second, the transition to coeducation at former women’s colleges, is a structural change in colleges. The third is long-run changes over time. Chapter 1 studies the change in women’s college major choices in response to a large, negative labor market shock, and how gender differences in STEM grades might lead women to have a stronger reaction to a labor market shock than men do. Although the dot-com crash had similar labor market effects for new graduates in engineering and computer science, it had different effects on who chose each major: women disproportionately left computer science, but not engineering. I investigate the mechanism behind the gender difference in reaction to the dot-com crash using administrative data on students from a four-year public university. At said university, the gender gap in grades (in favor of men) is larger in computer science than engineering. I estimate a structural model of major choice where students choose a major to maximize expected lifetime utility, conditional on grades, the labor market, and other factors. I find that if the distribution of grades had been the same in engineering and computer science, the gender difference in reaction to the dot-com crash would have been 33 to 42% smaller, suggesting that students reacted to the dot-com crash in accordance with their perceived comparative advantage. My results suggest that grades are an important component in retaining women in computer science degree programs. Universities hoping to encourage women to major in computer science should investigate the sources of gender gaps in STEM grades and work to help women improve their performance. Chapter 2 studies the change in women’s college major choices induced by the introduction of male peers. Though American women earn college degrees at higher rates than men, they are still under-represented in quantitative fields such as STEM and economics. Researchers have speculated gender differences in labor market decisions may originate in part from psycho-social factors such as gender norms and competition, many of which become more relevant to women when they are in more male environments. We leverage a unique setting that generated variation in women’s exposure to male peers: colleges that transitioned from women-only to coeducation. At such colleges, we observe a steady decrease in the share of women majoring in STEM over the decade following the transition to coeducation. This corresponds to a 17% decrease in the share of women majoring in STEM for a 10 percentage point increase in the male share of the graduating class. We find no evidence that the female share of faculty declines in response to the switch to coeducation, suggesting that our results are driven primarily by peer rather than by role-model effects. Our results suggest that women’s human capital investments are affected by the gender mix of their fellow students and have implications for gender gaps in the labor market. Chapter 3 studies long-run changes in men’s and women’s choices of college major over time, in particular whether a Schelling tipping pattern exists in the gender composition of college majors. Following Pan’s (2015) model of tipping in occupations, I build a framework that can produce a tipping pattern in the gender composition of college majors. However, I find that no evidence of a tipping pattern in college major. By relaxing two assumptions in previous tipping models, I explain theoretically why tipping may not occur in this context. I test the modified framework and find that the lack of tipping is most likely explained by men facing only small utility costs of being in highly female majors.

Url: https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/163214/arcal_1.pdf?sequence=1

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Authors: Calkins, Avery Regina

Institution: University of Michigan

Department: Economics

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Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Education, Gender

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