"The Gender Gap in Math: What are we Measuring?" by Silvia Griselda

The next session of the seminar "Gender, Behavior and Decision-Making" will take place on Tuesday the 10^th of January from 5pm to 6pm online (Teams).

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The seminar is held online (Teams event).

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We will have the pleasure to listen to Silvia Griselda who will present “The Gender Gap in Math: What are we Measuring?”.

Silvia Griselda is a Post-doctoral researcher at Bocconi University. In her research, she focuses on the determinants of inequality in education, with a particular focus on gender.

Abstract

Standardized tests are widely used to compare and select students and candidates, and by policy-makers as measures of human capital. But, do differences in these tests reflect underlying differences in knowledge, or do such exams reinforce education inequalities?

I employ data from the largest standardized test in the world, the PISA test, and reveal that the gender gaps in performance largely depend on the format of exams students are randomly allocated to. Exams with an additional 10 percentage points of multiple-choice questions increase women's under-performance in mathematics by 0.025 standard deviations and male under-performance in reading by 0.035 standard deviations.

I document that multiple-choice questions have large spillover effects on subsequent sections, and negatively affect students’ level of effort during the exam.

About our 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.