Nevertheless She Persisted? Gender Peer Effects in Doctoral STEM Programs

Valerie K. Bostwick, Bruce A. Weinberg

NBER Working Paper No. 25028
Issued in September 2018
NBER Program(s):Economics of Education, Labor Studies

We study the effects of peer gender composition, a proxy for female-friendliness of environment, in STEM doctoral programs on persistence and degree completion. Leveraging unique new data and quasi-random variation in gender composition across cohorts within programs, we show that women entering cohorts with no female peers are 11.9pp less likely to graduate within 6 years than their male counterparts. A 1 sd increase in the percentage of female students differentially increases the probability of on-time graduation for women by 4.6pp. These gender peer effects function primarily through changes in the probability of dropping out in the first year of a Ph.D. program and are largest in programs that are typically male-dominated.

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Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w25028