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
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 [email for draft]
(with Ulf Zölitz and Uschi Backes-Gellner)
We study the impact of online instruction with a field experiment that randomly assigns 1,344 university students to different proportions of online and in-person lectures in multiple introductory courses. Increased online proportion leaves men’s exam performance unaffected but significantly lowers women’s performance, particularly in math-intensive courses. Online instruction also reduces women’s longer-run performance and increases their study dropout. Exploring the mechanisms, we find that women exposed to more online lectures report lower course satisfaction, greater difficulty in connecting with peers, and perceive instructors as less engaging. Our findings caution policymakers that shifting toward more online instruction may disproportionally harm women.
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)
Permanent working paper
The Minority Trap: Minority Status Drives Women Out of Male-Dominated Fields