The Quarterly Journal of Economics· 2014Q1
Gender, Competitiveness, and Career Choices *
- 808citations
- Q1SCImago
- 2014year
Short summary
Boys are 20% more likely than girls to choose more prestigious, math- and science-intensive academic tracks, a difference largely explained by boys' higher competitiveness, even when academic ability is equal.
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Key points
- Boys choose more prestigious, math/science-intensive academic tracks than girls in the Netherlands.
- Boys exhibit substantially higher competitiveness than girls in a standard laboratory experiment.
- Competitiveness is positively correlated with choosing more prestigious academic tracks, even after controlling for academic ability.
- The gender gap in competitiveness explains about 20% of the gender gap in academic track choice.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Abstract Gender differences in competitiveness have been hypothesized as a potential explanation for gender differences in education and labor market outcomes. We examine the predictive power of a standard laboratory experimental measure of competitiveness for the later important choice of academic track of secondary school students in the Netherlands. Although boys and girls display similar levels of academic ability, boys choose substantially more prestigious academic tracks, where more prestigious tracks are more math- and science-intensive. Our experimental measure shows that boys are also substantially more competitive than girls. We find that competitiveness is strongly positively correlated with choosing more prestigious academic tracks even conditional on academic ability. Most important, we find that the gender difference in competitiveness accounts for a substantial portion (about 20%) of the gender difference in track choice.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2014 · DOI ↗
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