Autores: Manuel Barrón, Pia Basurto, Juan F. Castro, Román A. Zárate

Resumen

We study the treatment and spillover effects of an intervention that combines STEM female role models and feedback on gender-science stereotypes on high school students’ attitudes towards women in STEM fields and peer recognition. We use a two-phase experimental design: classrooms are randomly assigned to saturation levels of the intervention, and conditional on these levels, students are assigned to the treatment. While only treated students change their attitudes towards women in STEM fields, we find treatment and spillover effects on the selection of female peers as classroom representatives for a math competition, with no differences in the performance of selected candidates. Our results suggest that targeting peers to recognize women’s abilities can be highly effective as peers influence how students form opinions about each other.

Expositor

Juan F. Castro

Professor in the Department of Economics at Universidad del Pacifico (Lima, Peru). Obtained a PhD in International Development at the University of Oxford and a MSc in Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research focuses on applied microeconometrics, education, skill formation and early childhood development.