SCCEI Seminar Series (Fall 2024)

Friday, November 22, 2024 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

Response to Competition: Gender, Domains, and STEM Choice
 

Women’s lower performance in competitive environments has been advanced as an explanation for gender inequalities in the labor market. Using broadly representative Chinese administrative data, and measuring response to competition (RC) by performance changes from a mock exam to the competitive High School Entrance Exam, we document higher RC for boys in STEM and for girls in non-STEM subjects, with the male STEM RC advantage weakened by random exposure to high-performing female classmates in STEM. Both domain-specific RC measures significantly predict subsequent STEM track choice, accounting for 26% of the adjusted gender gap in STEM specialization, a known precursor to the gender pay gap.

Please register for the event to receive email updates and add it to your calendar. Lunch will be provided.

About the Speaker 
 

Jane Zhang is an Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales and a Visiting Scholar (2024-25) at the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions. Her research examines how preferences and beliefs are shaped by policy, how they interact with incentives, and the role that they play in determining a wide-range of social outcomes. Her approach combines the use of tools from the experimental economics field, with the exploitation of natural experiments, field experiments, and controlled lab manipulations to make causal inferences about the determinants of preferences and beliefs. Her work has been published in outlets such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, the American Economic Review: Insights, the Review of Economics and Statistics, Economic Journal, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. She received her PhD in Economics from U.C. Berkeley and BA in Economics from Stanford University.

A NOTE ON LOCATION

Please join us in-person in the Goldman Conference Room located within Encina Hall on the 4th floor of the East wing.

Questions? Contact Xinmin Zhao at xinminzhao@stanford.edu