Seminar on Gender "The Effect of Culture on the Gender Gap in STEM” "

The next session of the seminar « Gender, Behavior and Decision-Making » will take place on Tuesday the 2nd of April from 5 pm to 6 pm online (Teams). The Teams link will be provided in due time. 

We will have the pleasure to listen to Margaux Suteau  who will present “Back to the Roots: the Effect of Culture on the Gender Gap in STEM” (Co-authored with Caroline Coly).
 

Registration
 

Margaux Suteau is a London School of Economics Fellow in the Department of Social Policy after finishing her PhD in Economics at ESSEC and CY Cergy Paris Université. Her work lies in the intersection of gender, education and labor economics, and relies on public policy evaluation to understand how we can bridge the gender gap in education and in the labor market. She has been working first on the effect of a change in succession laws granting women the right to inherit from the land in India on these women’s education, labor and marriage markets outcomes (working paper). Her current projects look at the under-representation of women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, the role of culture and the importance of access to equipment in a gender-unbiased environment. 

Abstract
 

This paper explores the impact of a new mechanism in reinforcing gender norms: the influence of cultural norms and gender attitudes on educational decisions, especially in STEM fields. To disentangle the effect of norms from institutions, we employ the epidemiological methodology: we use a cohort of second-generation immigrants in France and compare their higher education choices to the share of women in STEM in the country of origin of their parents. We draw upon the extensive TéO survey, which offers a representative sample enriched with essential immigration-related variables. Our findings show that men originating from countries with progressive gender norms in STEM exhibit a greater likelihood to pursue STEM, whereas the effect for women reverses. We discuss the implications of these findings in the context of the gender equality paradox theory.  

About the Women & Science Chair
 

The Women and Science Chair at Université Paris Dauphine - PSL, created with the support of the L’Oréal Foundation, the Generali Foundation, La Poste, and the Talan Group, seeks to engage and foster interdisciplinary approaches to analyzing the causes and consequences of the underrepresentation of women in careers in scientific research and academia.

The Women and Science Chair is member of the UNESCO chairs network.

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