Joining the Old Boys’ Club: Women’s Returns to Majoring in Technology and Engineering

Título: Joining the Old Boys’ Club: Women’s Returns to Majoring in Technology and Engineering Speaker: Josefa Aguirre (PUC) Abstract: We investigate the economic consequences for women of majoring in Technology and Engineering (TE). We leverage discontinuities built-in Chile’s centralized college admission system to identify the causal effects of majoring in different fields on graduation, labor market outcomes, marriage, and fertility. We find that while majoring in TE increases earnings for men, it does not have the same effect for women. This disparity is not due to men and women working in different types of firms or sectors; instead, women do not receive the same wage premium for a TE degree within the same sectors. Although we find that the costs associated with childbearing are particularly high for women in TE, this factor does not appear to be driving the observed results for women in our sample. Furthermore, we do not find clear evidence of a positive return for women in the marriage market.