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IZA Discussion Paper No. 18001
July 2025
Can Better Information Reduce College Gender Gaps? The Impact of Relative Grade Signals on Academic Outcomes for Students in Introductory Economics

forthcoming in: Southern Economic Journal

This paper considers the impacts of grades and information on gender gaps in college major and college dropout rates at a large public flagship university. Observational and experimental results suggest women are more responsive to introductory economics grades when deciding whether to major in economics while men are more responsive to introductory economics grades when deciding whether to drop out of college. Providing better information about grade distributions appears to only somewhat mitigate these impacts. These results suggest better information may blunt the impact of relative grade sensitivities on college gender gaps but may not fully outweigh the saliency of grades. Finally, we consider the extent to which aligning economics grading standards with those of competing disciplines would reduce the gender gap in economics graduates but find relatively limited impacts.

Communications
Mark Fallak
mark.fallak@liser.lu
+352 585-855-526
World of Labour
Olga Nottmeyer
olga.nottmeyer@liser.lu
+352 585-855-501
Network Coordination
Christina Gathmann
christina.gathmann@liser.lu

The IZA@LISER Network is a global community of scholars dedicated to excellence in labor economics and related fields, now coordinated at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) following its transition from Bonn.

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