Econometrics Seminar Series. “How Adolescent Skill Gaps Contribute to Gender Disparities in STEM Major/Occupation Choices: A Nonparametric Approach”
Published: 3 November 2025
7 November 2025. Professor Petra Todd, University of Pennsylvania
Professor Petra Todd, University of Pennsylvania
“How Adolescent Skill Gaps Contribute to Gender Disparities in STEM Major/Occupation Choices: A Nonparametric Approach”
Friday, 7 November 2025. 16:00
Online
Abstract
In the US, women go to college at higher rates than men, but they are less likely to choose applied-STEM college majors or occupations. Using the NLSY79 and 97 datasets, this paper examines how adolescent skill sets and high school course-taking patterns for men and women predict their four-year college degree attainment, college major, and occupational choices. It considers five cognitive skill measures (math, verbal, science, administrative, and mechanical) and one non-cognitive measure. Results show that high-school-aged women in the NLSY97 cohort reached parity with men in mathematics skills, on average, and have an advantage in
verbal and noncognitive domains, but they lag behind in mechanical and, to a lesser extent, science skills. Logistic and CART/random forest models are estimated to explore the skill determinants of decisions to pursue a four-year college degree, to major in STEM and to enter a STEM occupation. A nonparametric decomposition approach quantifies how eliminating gender skill disparities would affect STEM field entry.
Bio
Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professsor of Economics Chair, Department of Economics.
Professor Todd is also a Research Associate of Penn’s Population Studies Center, NBER, and IZA. She serves on the editorial board of the International Economic Review and the Econometrics Journal. She is a fellow of the Econometrics Society and of the Society of Labor Economists (SOLE).
Her main fields of research are social program evaluation, labor economics, and microeconometrics. She has published papers on econometric methods for evaluating the effects of program/policy interventions, the determinants of cognitive achievement, testing for discrimination in motor vehicle searches, sources of racial and gender labor market disparities, pension program design and on conditional cash transfer programs.
She is currently working on projects analyzing the effects of personality traits on gender labor market disparities, evaluating the effects of grade retention in Portugal, analyzing the effects of local minimum wage policies in the US, and analyzing the effects of a nationwide preschool reform in Mexico.
For further information, please contact business-seminar-series@glasgow.ac.uk.
We are committed to providing a collegial, inclusive, and intellectually stimulating environment for all our seminars, in accordance with our established Code of Conduct.
First published: 3 November 2025