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Grosman Jiří ”Role Models, High School Management and Female Engagement in STEM: Evidence from the Czech Republic"

Master Thesis Chair:
Jan Zápal

Abstract:

The fact that the gender wage gap remains at least in part driven by women’s self-selection out of profitable career choices has been an established fact in the labour economics literature. What has been given comparatively less attention by economists, however, are the motivating factors of such self-selection. In this thesis, I design an empirical strategy aimed to assess the strength of a particular driver of differential gendered choices: high school management, and the associated policy intervention. Specifically, I examine the STEM preferences of high school students using population data on Czech university applicants between the years of 2007-2021. By employing both matching and a differencein-differences estimation framework to facilitate causal interpretation, I argue that school mentoring programmes, and the way the school is being run, can significantly affect the choices made by a non-negligible number of female students - an inference corroborated by the data and my subsequent analysis.

Full Text: “Role Models, High School Management and Female Engagement in STEM: Evidence from the Czech Republic"