Yuki Takahashi

Why do fewer female students enter STEM despite negligible gender gaps in mathematics and science? Using an incentivized discrete choice experiment with high school students, we show that both females and males prefer gender-balanced college programs and prefer being a majority to a minority, driven by anticipated difficulty fitting in. High-math-ability females show stronger minority avoidance in STEM, while males show the opposite. Combined with STEM’s low female share, these preferences lead to inefficient talent allocation: high-math-ability students, especially females, forgo STEM, and low-math-ability students enter. These findings suggest STEM's gender composition itself deters female entry.

Introductory STEM courses may disproportionately deter women by understating these fields' societal relevance or presuming prior technical knowledge. Leveraging a curricular reform in an introductory computer science course at a liberal arts college that shifted emphasis from technical foundations to social relevance, we show that the reform increased women's likelihood of majoring in computer science compared with men without diminishing their academic performance. This effect operates primarily through greater retention of women who entered intending to major in computer science. The reform also increased women's earnings after graduation by shifting them into higher-paying occupations.

While successful teamwork often involves correcting colleagues' mistakes, it may have negative interpersonal consequences. In an experiment, I show that it also has negative economic consequences: individuals are less willing to collaborate with those who have corrected them, even when the correction benefits the team. The data are consistent with negative feedback aversion: individuals who initially received positive feedback about their ability are significantly less willing to collaborate with those who corrected their mistakes, but not with those who corrected their right actions. Additionally, I find that men, but not women, are more tolerant of women who corrected their right actions. It is potentially due to men's beliefs about women's abilities, making women's corrections of their right actions less ego-threatening. This reluctance to work with those who provide corrective feedback can undermine teamwork, and mixed-gender teams may attract less competent women due to gendered sorting.