Working papers
Gender Diversity Improves Academic Performance [email for draft]
Does greater gender diversity within peer groups benefit students? I investigate this question through a multi-year field experiment in which 3,060 university students are randomly assigned to 765 study groups. Group gender diversity significantly raises academic performance: Students in gender-balanced groups obtain grades 0.15 SD higher than those in homogeneous groups; they also report improved well-being. Mechanism analyses show that gender diversity reduces social friction and reinforces gender roles: While women ask more questions, men explain more. Unlike skill diversity, gender diversity also narrows performance variation within groups. My findings highlight the value of increasing gender diversity in higher education.
(with Christine Exley, Raymond Fisman, Judd Kessler, Louis-Pierre Lepage, Corinne Low, Xiaomeng Li, Mattie Toma, and Basit Zafar)
We analyze data from two universities that allowed students to replace letter grades with “credit” on their transcripts. We observe a significant and substantial gender concealment gap: women are significantly less likely than men to conceal grades that would harm their GPAs. This gap arises despite students’ knowledge of their exact letter grade before making concealment decisions. The gap is large and consistent across levels of student performance, student traits, and features of courses. It creates an important, and likely unintended, inequity: GPA gains from the grade-optional policy benefit men nearly 50% more than women.
Disconnecting Women: Gender Disparities in the Impact of Online Instruction
(with Ulf Zölitz and Uschi Backes-Gellner)
This paper experimentally studies gender disparities in the impact of online instruction. We randomly assign 1,300 university students to varying proportions of online versus in-person lectures in different courses. The results show that increased exposure to online instruction significantly reduces women’s academic performance but has no impact on men. The negative impact on women is concentrated in math-intensive courses and leads to decreased educational attainment in the longer run. We also find that women hold a lower preference for online lectures and evaluate them as less informative, interactive, and accessible. Our findings highlight that introducing online education disproportionately disadvantages women.
Publications
Lowering the Playing Field: Discrimination through Sequential Spillover Effects (with Judd Kessler and Corinne Low)
Accepted, Review of Economics and Statistics
Peers Affect Personality Development (with Ulf Zölitz)
Accepted, Review of Economics and Statistics
Access to Pensions, Old-Age Support, and Child Investment in China (with Albert Park)
Accepted, Journal of Human Resources
Selected work in progress
Gender Differences in Salary Requests - Analysis in progress
Father Involvement and Family Well-Being - Fieldwork in progress
(with Anne Brenøe, Pietro Biroli, and Victoria Baranov)