January 2019 NBER Digest
Why Are STEM Doctoral Completion Rates Lower for Women?
Women entering PhD programs in which they have no female peers are 12 percentage points less likely to graduate than men entering the same program.
More than half of all doctoral graduates in the United States in 2016 were women, but women accounted for just 23 percent of engineering and 26 percent of mathematics graduates.
In Nevertheless She Persisted? Gender Peer Effects in Doctoral STEM Programs (NBER Working Paper No. 25028),
Valerie K. Bostwick and
Bruce A. Weinberg explore differences in PhD class composition in an attempt to explain why women are underrepresented in science-related fields. They find that women who enter PhD programs in which they have no female peers are 12 percentage points less likely to graduate than men in the same program. A one standard deviation increase in the percentage of female students (a 20.7 percentage point increase) closes that gap in the probability of on-time graduation by 4.6 percentage points.
When the Fed Lowers U.S. Rates, Emerging Market Loans Soar
e-Commerce and the Pricing Behavior of Traditional Retailers
Early Retirement and Mortality Rates of Blue-Collar Men
DoD Contractor Mergers Increased Use of No-Bid, Cost-Plus Deals
Long-Term Effects of Children's Neighborhood Environs
As Visa Lines Lengthen, STEM PhDs Look Homeward
< Previous Digest Issues >
— Morgan Foy
The Digest is not copyrighted and may be reproduced freely
with appropriate attribution of source.