College major choice and beliefs about relative ability: an experimental intervention to understand gender gaps in STEM

Despite earning more than half of all college degrees, women remain persistently underrepresented in many quantitative fields such as computer science, engineering, and economics. Previous research suggests that women hold biased beliefs about their own relative ability in math-intensive fields. In particular, women may underestimate their own performance or ability and overestimate how high they must perform to pursue a major in science, technology, engineering, math, or economics (STEM). This information friction could be leading them to inefficiently avoid entering and remaining in STEM. Using students in large introductory STEM courses across seven disciplines at a large university, this study randomly provides students with information about their performance relative to their classmates and relative to STEM majors (Treatment 1); a subset of high-performing students receive additional encouragement emphasizing their STEM potential (Treatment 2). I measure how students update their beliefs about relative performance in response to the treatments, and how their subsequent behavior such as course-taking and major choice changes. The experiment allows me to test how beliefs matter for major choice and how students update their beliefs to incorporate new information. By measuring gender differences in these mechanisms, I will contribute to understanding gender differences in college major choice and policies that may or may not be successful in narrowing gaps. By measuring differences across the seven fields where I implement the intervention, I will contribute to the thus far limited knowledge of how gender dynamics vary across STEM fields.