Gender Differences in Persistence in a Field of Study
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Abstract
The underrepresentation of women in some quantitatively oriented academic fields such as STEM, business, and economics is widely seen across U.S. colleges and universities. Among potential explanations for this gender imbalance, some scholars have noted that the average grade levels in these fields tend to be substantially lower than in others, and have hypothesized that female students are generally characterized by relatively greater sensitivity to the grades they receive. This paper undertakes an examination of these questions using a rich Indiana University Learning Analytics dataset, which fully represents undergraduate student academic activities over the period of 2006 through 2017. After conditioning on a student’s starting academic field, we estimate the gender effect on students’ academic paths in terms of the likelihood of persistence in their original academic area or switching to a particular academic alternative. This analysis supports the conjectures that women in STEM, business, and economics fields do exhibit relatively stronger sensitivity to grades in their decisions about persisting or switching to another field, which in part helps explain their lower representation among graduates in these areas. Our significant new finding is that the conclusion about women’s greater sensitivity to grades is specific to the aforementioned fields of study and does not universally extend to other starting academic disciplines. We find, in particular, that in the social sciences and humanities category, women demonstrate either equal or higher levels of persistence across various grade levels, relative to men. These empirical results suggest that stronger sensitivity to grades, rather than being a gender-specific phenomenon, is more likely to reflect gender differences in the underlying preferences for academic fields. We further demonstrate the plausibility of this conclusion by means of theoretical analysis of a model of student choices of academic concentrations. An important takeaway from our results is that it is one’s weaker underlying preference for a field of study that is likely to make a student more “sensitive” to grades received in it, rather than the other way around. This is contrary to a commonly suggested understanding that it is the underlying stronger sensitivity to grades that makes students possessing such characteristic less attached to “tougher” grading fields.