Essays on the Economics of Education and Gender

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three essays in the economics of education. The first essay estimates the impact on women’s educational outcomes from having a higher percentage of female peers. Leveraging quasi-random variation on the gender peer composition of STEM majors in a higher education vocational institution, I show that women benefit from having higher percentages of female peers. Specifically, a ten percentage point increase in the proportion of women in a STEM major cohort has a statistically significant positive effect on female students. It decreases female dropout rates by 9.6% and increases GPA by 0.05 standard deviations. The evidence suggests peer effects are mediated by the gender of the instructors. As female students have fewer female instructors, the effect of having more female peers intensifies. The second essay evaluates a randomized control trial intervention that gave information to high-performing students on their performance relative to other students. The results show that women and men were affected differently by the intervention: effects for women with high self-confidence are higher than the effects for men in the same group. For high-performing women who have low self-confidence in their math ability, the probability that they apply to any major increases and the selectivity of their choice of major-university also increases. The increase in application probability comes from an increase in applications for health majors. The third essay describes and explores the STEM gender gap in higher education enrollment and application. The paper focuses on how the STEM gender gap varies depending on students’ socioeconomic status (SES). We show that the gender gap in STEM enrollment among top-performing Chilean students is larger for low-SES students than high-SES students. Low-SES men enroll in STEM majors 3.7 times more than low-SES women, while high-SES men enroll in STEM majors 2.4 times more than high-SES women.