Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Returning To The Gender Gap In College Major: How Much Can Pre- College Skills Explain?, Nathalie Beauchamps

The Yale Undergraduate Research Journal

The gender wage gap in the United States is a well-known phenomenon and researchers across many disciplines have tried to pinpoint its cause. One popular explanation is the gender gap in college major choice; however, it is still unknown why women tend to major in so-called soft sciences and men in hard sciences. This paper builds upon Speer (2017)’s work studying the gender gap in major choice as explained by test scores. Rather than utilizing OLS regressions, I employ a Kitagawa-Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition method, which also shows how unspecified discrimination works for or against women (or men) in how much their …