An Econometric Model of the Role of Gender in Economic Education
Abstract
The existing empirical evidence on the role of gender in economic education has resulted in a variety of findings. Two-thirds of the studies that examined students' level of understanding, or stock of knowledge, report significant gender differences, with men outperforming women on measures of economic knowledge (John Siegfried, 1979). These gender effects do not appear in analyses of economic learning or knowledge using elementary (Donald Davison and John Kilgore, 1971; William Walstad, 1979) or junior high students (Michael MacDowell et al., 1977; Stephen Buckles and Vera Freeman, 1984). However, the evidence suggests that by the time students reach high school, significant gender differences exist in both the learning and understanding of economic knowledge (Robert Highsmith, 1974; Daniel Thornton and George Vredeveld, 1977; M. E. Moyer and D. W. Paden, 1968). The existing literature suggests that men demonstrate a higher level of economic understanding than women, but that this difference appears during adolescence. (An exception is a study by Michael Watts, 1987, in which gender differences appeared as early as the fifth grade among some students.) Beyond the high school years, men still exhibit a higher level of knowledge than women, but the knowledge appears to accumulate at equivalent rates. Thus, the high school years are crucial in the establishment of these observed gender differences, differences that persist well into college. The explanation that is typically advanced for the origination of these gender differences is a cultural milieu that discourages girls from engaging in analytical thought or taking an interest in the business world, a stereotype that would be particularly strong during adolescence (Siegfried and Stephen Strand, 1977). However, there is some evidence that gender differences in tests of economic knowledge are more pronounced when student performance is tested by means of a multiple-choice instrument. Female students may, in fact, outperform their male counterparts when performance is measured by essay questions, a result explained by females' higher verbal skills and males' higher spatial and quantitative skills (Keith Lumsden and Alex Scott, 1987). As discussed above, previous studies of the gender differences on most performance tests have generally found that males score higher than females. However, these studies may actually be overestimating the level of understanding of the population of all women students, thereby causing a serious downward bias in estimates of gender differences. If participation in an economics course is voluntary, students who take the course have selected themselves into it, making it possible that they differ from students who did not choose to take the course. Results based on these nonrandom samples are tDiscussants: Thomas Kniesner, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; George Tauchen, Duke University; Michael K. Salemi, University of North CarolinaChapel Hill.
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