Seminar on Gender "Why do women choose different medical specialities?"

The next session of the seminar « Gender, Behavior and Decision-Making » will take place Tuesday the 3rd of October from 5 pm to 6 pm online (Teams). The Teams link will be provided after registration. 

We will have the pleasure to listen to Noémi Berlin, from EconomiX (Université Paris Nanterre) who will present :

“Why do women choose different medical specialities? The role of taste for competition and specialty amenities”
 

Registration
 

Noémi Berlin is a CNRS researcher affiliated at the University Paris Nanterre, EconomiX. She is a behavioural economist and is particularly interested in understanding the determinants of various health behaviours such as food and smoking behaviours, but also in studying gender differences in educational and labor decisions. She has been running lab and field experiments on different types of population (e.g. children, pregnant smokers).  

Abstract
 

Empirical evidence shows that men and women make different educational choices and hold different types of occupations. In this paper, we study the case of medical studies in France: a very competitive field in which there are today more women than men and where high gender imbalances in terms of medical specialty choices are observed.  We investigate the determinants of the gender gap of specialty choices that takes place at the end of the 6th year of medical studies after taking a national exam that rank the students allowing them to sequentially choose a specialty from the available residency positions.
We confirm that women perform less and thus have a more constrained specialty choice set than men. The taste for competition largely explains this gender gap. We also show that even when facing the same choice set, women choose different specialties than men and that is mainly because women have different tastes for specialties amenities. 

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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