Is economics a man’s business? Exploring the long-term effects of the gender gap in economic competencies at the upper secondary level on students’ choice to study economics at university

Abstract

In higher education, across countries, a large share of students choose to study economics. Although there is only a small difference in the share of female and male students in that field, there is robust empirical evidence of a gender gap in economic competencies, showing that male students in most cases outperform female students. There is a broad discussion about the differences in gender-specific socializations that cause this gender gap. However, no research exists on the long-term effects of this gender gap. This study uses longitudinal and representative data of N = 1397 Swiss students (824 female students) to analyse the gender-specific effects of economic competencies at the end of the upper secondary level on their aspiration and decision to study economics. The results show that economic knowledge and interest in economics have a substantially stronger effect on the choice of economics for female students. The aspiration to study strongly mediates these effects. We argue that these results can mainly be traced back to different interests and self-perceptions of skills and abilities in economics caused by gender-specific socialization. Possible implications of gender socialization and discrimination in economics for secondary and higher education and for the labour market are discussed.

Gender question: Econometric answer

“…As the variety and deepness of the methods for the analyses stimulate the differences in the received results. Mostly the variation is in the data source: open statistical sources (Haussen & Schlegel, 2019;Rocha & Van Praag, 2020) or personally conducted survey (Gupta et al, 2014;Jüttler& Schumann, 2019) or usage of surveys received from the known agencies (Huertas et al, 2017;Vieito, 2012) or global organizations (Bardasi et al, 2011), like UN (Brixiová et al, 2020). As to the methods, authors mostly declare the suitability of such list of methods to support sufficient and reliable results and conclusions: autoregressive model and granger-causality (Haussen& Schlegel, 2019); econometric decomposition methods and panel data techniques (Huertas et al, 2017); multivariate statistical analysis (Gupta et al, 2014;Bardasi et al, 2011) and descriptive statistical analysis (Vieito, 2012;Rocha & Van Praag, 2020;Jüttler & Schumann, 2019), OLS regression along with quantile regression (Brixiová et al, 2020).…”

Development of economic competence of students at general grammar schools through a non-formal opportunity to learn with experts

“…Findings from various studies regarding formal learning opportunities (e.g. Beck, 1993;Brückner et al, 2015;Jüttler and Schumann, 2019;Kaiser et al, 2019;Lüdecke-Plümer and Sczesny, 1998;Macha, 2015;Müller et al, 2007;Nagy et al, 2012;Schumann et al, 2011;Siegfried, 2019;Sticca et al, 2018;Walstad and Rebeck, 2001) can only be compared to a limited extent not only because of their heterogeneity at the curricular level, but also because of their different approaches to definitions and measurements. Nevertheless, we can summarise that learners who were able to perceive more formal learning opportunities with economic content (higher grade level, advanced course, type of school) show a higher degree of economic knowledge (Ackermann and Siegfried, 2019;Beck, 1993;Hoidn and Kaminski, 2006;Lüdecke-Plümer and Sczesny, 1998;Müller et al, 2007;Schumann and Eberle, 2014;Walstad and Rebeck, 2001).…”

“…Since, studies for the economic context focus mainly on the effect of formal learning opportunities (e.g. Förster and Happ, 2019;Jüttler and Schumann, 2019;Siegfried and Hangen, 2020;Walstad and Rebeck, 2001), domain-related studies from the area of financial literacy are used to identify effects due to non-formal and informal learning opportunities. However, their results point to inconsistent results and refer to partly positive effects (Rudeloff, 2019;Schürkmann and Schuhen, 2013) and), but also show no effect at all (Fürstenau and Hommel, 2019).…”

Results from the test of economic literacy in Germany and Japan: A critical discussion on the gender effect

“…In the literature of economic education, the discussion repeatedly focuses on gender (see Holtsch et al, 2019; Jüttler and Schumann, 2019; Siegfried and Wuttke, 2019). This gender discussion covers two aspects; quantity and quality of female students who study business and economics.…”