Women have been traditionally underrepresented in several fields of study, notably those with the highest returns. While in the last two decades many disciplines, including mathematics and physical sciences, have made significant progress in attracting and retaining women, there has been little improvement in the field of economics, which remains heavily male-dominated. We report results from a field experiment aimed at increasing the percentage of women majoring in economics through exposure to carefully chosen female role models. We randomly selected a subset of Principles of Economics classes to be assigned to our role model treatment. Since the same classes were also offered and taught by the same instructors the previous year, we are able to employ a difference-in-differences estimation strategy to test whether the role model intervention increased the percentage of women planning to major in economics (survey-based) and enrolling in intermediate economics classes (administrative data) the semester and year following the intervention. Our results suggest that, while the role model intervention had no impact on male students, it significantly increased female students' likelihood of expressing interest in the economics major and enrolling in further economics classes.

中文翻译：

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专业选择中的性别差异：女性榜样的重要性

传统上，女性在几个研究领域的代表性不足，特别是那些回报最高的领域。虽然在过去的二十年里，包括数学和物理科学在内的许多学科在吸引和留住女性方面取得了重大进展，但在仍然以男性为主的经济学领域几乎没有进步。我们报告了一项实地实验的结果，该实验旨在通过接触精心挑选的女性榜样来提高经济学专业的女性比例。我们随机选择了经济学原理课程的一个子集，分配给我们的榜样治疗。由于前一年也由相同的教师提供和教授相同的课程，我们能够采用差异中的差异估计策略来测试角色模型干预是否增加了计划主修经济学（基于调查）并在接下来的学期和下一年注册中级经济学课程（管理数据）的女性比例干预。我们的结果表明，虽然榜样干预对男学生没有影响，但它显着增加了女学生表达对经济学专业的兴趣并报读更多经济学课程的可能性。