13:00 - 14:30
Panel Session 1
Room: Zoom
Moderator/s:
Florian Foos
Closing the Gender Gap in Undergraduate Political Methodology Training
Brittany Perry 1, Diana O'Brien 2
1 Texas A&M University, College Station
2 Rice University, Houston

Recent years have witnessed both increased attention to the costs associated with women's under-representation in STEM fields and also greater efforts to mitigate these gender disparities. Within political science, in particular, there is growing emphasis on bolstering women's presence in the political methodology sub-field. We contribute to these efforts with an intervention aimed at increasing female undergraduate students' interest in quantitative political science at a large southern U.S. university. After discovering that the university's female political science students were less likely to pursue a quantitatively oriented Bachelors of Science degree, we designed a short, female-friendly presentation on the benefits of the degree, which we delivered to a randomly selected subset of discussion sections in an introductory political science course. To evaluate the utility of this intervention, we compare it to an alternative, more conventional presentation delivered to the remaining discussion sections. Our initial results suggest that providing information about the benefits of the quantitatively-oriented major helps close the gender gap in men's and women's likelihood of pursuing such a degree. And, it seems plausible that the female-friendly intervention is especially effective. When completed, this field experiment---which is still ongoing---may provide a low cost intervention that can boost women's interest in pursuing quantitatively-oriented majors.


Reference:
Th-P1-03
Session:
Political Methodology
Presenter/s:
Brittany Perry
Topic:
EU Politics
Presentation type:
Oral presentation
Room:
Zoom
Moderator/s:
Florian Foos
Date:
Thursday, 18 June
Time:
13:30 - 13:45
Session times:
13:00 - 14:30

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