Gender research is a hot area in academia. A spate of new research is coming out on how to help women persist in male-dominated fields, such as science, engineering and economics. A study by a Swiss grad student captured my attention, as it was a well-designed experiment in what happens when you randomly assign students to different ratios of males and females in study groups. 

The working paper, “Does Minority Status Drive Women out of Male-Dominated Fields?, by Xiaoyue Shan at the University of Zurich, is posted on her website.

• When a female was the sole woman in a study group and the other members were men, she was 10 percentage points more likely to drop an introductory economics course than women in gender-balanced or female-dominated study groups. 
• Men’s dropout behavior was unaffected by the gender composition of their study group. 

• This is early research that needs to be replicated but it is in line with what other researchers are discovering about gender dynamics. 

• Shan suggests clustering women together in male-dominated courses and not spreading them out evenly when creating study or laboratory groups.

1. Shan, Xiaoyue. Does Minority Status Drive Women out of Male-Dominated Fields? October 13, 2020 working paper 
2. Born, Andreas and Ranehill, Eva and Sandberg, Anna, Gender and willingness to lead – does the gender composition of teams matter? (March 1, 2020). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3207198 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3207198 
3. Porter, Catherine, and Danila Serra. 2020. "Gender Differences in the Choice of Major: The Importance of Female Role Models." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 12 (3): 226-54. 
4. Stoddard, Olga and Karpowitz, Chris and Preece, Jessica, Strength in Numbers: A Field Experiment in Gender, Influence, and Group Dynamics. IZA Discussion Paper No. 13741, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3704122