Professors in Core Science Fields Are Not Always Biased against Women: Evidence from France
Journal article: We investigate the link between how male-dominated a field is, and gender bias against women in this field. Taking the entrance exam of a French higher education institution as a natural experiment, we find that evaluation is actually biased in favor of females in more male-dominated subjects (e.g., math, philosophy) and in favor of males in more female-dominated subjects (e.g., literature, biology), inducing a rebalancing of gender ratios between students recruited for research careers in science and humanities majors. Evaluation bias is identified from systematic variations across subjects in the gap between students' nonanonymous oral and anonymous written test scores.
Author(s)
Thomas Breda, Son Thierry Ly
Journal
- American Economic Journal: Applied Economics
Date of publication
- 2015
Keywords
- Higher education institution
- Woman
Pages
- 53-75
URL of the HAL notice
Version
- 1
Volume
- 7