brown bag Travail et Économie Publique

Du 28/11/2024 de 12:30 à 13:30

PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09

DOUSSET Léa (PSE)

The End of a Gender Quota in Elite Higher Education

We show that a gender quota system in competitive higher education institutions could be an efficient solution to address the issue of women under-representation in math-intensive fields and elite environments. We use original hand-collected historical data from the entrance exam for one of the most competitive graduate schools in France to evaluate the effect of a change in admission policy that removed a hard gender-based quota system. We document that the end of the quota led to a sharp decline in the percentage of admitted female candidates, but only in math-intensive fields. We then focus on the mathematics entrance exam to delve into the mechanisms. We show that roughly half of this fall can be mechanically explained by a gender performance gap. However, we also uncover an endogenous response by female candidates: there are fewer female candidates at the entrance exam once it became mixed-gender, and this turning-away mechanism is mostly driven by potentially high-achieving female candidates. This detrimental endogenous response of women in a real-life context is important. As this elite institution leads to high-level academic careers in France, we show that the removal of the gender quota increased the gender gap in academic careers for affected students.