CInSt Research Seminar

Silvia Griselda (University of Melbourne) has presented her paper: "Can the Format of Questions Explain the Gender Gap in Mathematics?" on regular CInSt research seminar on November, 19. Watch the video of the seminar following the link bellow.

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Standardized assessments are widely used to determine educational and economic opportunities. These standardized assessments exclusively, or in large part, use multiple-choice questions. But multiple-choice exams may not be adequate for comparing students’ competencies across genders. In this paper, I show that female students receive lower marks when randomly assigned to exams with a larger proportion of multiple-choice questions. Specifically, a 10 percentage point increase in the proportion of multiple-choice questions widens the gender difference in mathematics performance by 0.026 standard deviations in favor of men, an effect that represents about 50% of the overall gender gap. Moreover, a higher proportion of multiple-choice questions has negative spillovers to other open-ended questions on the same exam. Female students put differentially less effort than males into tests that contain a larger proportion of multiple-choice questions. I provide evidence suggesting that these results are driven by women’s lower confidence and by the stereotypes that women face in traditionally male domains

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