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Gender stereotypes in the family

15 May 2024, 1:00 pm–2:00 pm

Pupil writing in school exam

Join this event to hear Valentina Tonei discuss whether and why parents have gender-stereotyped beliefs when they assess their children's abilities.

This event is free.

Event Information

Open to

All

Availability

Yes

Cost

Free

Organiser

Tobias Ruttenauer

Location

Room G05
55-59 Gordon Square
London
WC1H 0NU

We study whether and why parents have gender-stereotyped beliefs when they assess their children's abilities. Exploiting systematic differences in parental beliefs about a child's skills and blindly graded standardized test scores, we find that parents overestimate boys' skills more so than girls' in mathematics (a male-stereotyped subject), whereas there are no gender differences for reading.

Consistent with an information friction hypothesis, we use exogenous variation in parents' interview dates to document that the parental gender bias disappears for parents who are interviewed after receiving information on their child’s test scores. We further show that parental gender bias to the detriment of girls contributes to explaining the widening of the gender gap in mathematical skills later in childhood, supporting the hypothesis that exposure to gender biases negatively influences girls’ ability to achieve their full potential.


This event is part of the Quantitative Social Science seminar series: Quantitative Social Science (QSS) and the Centre for Longitudinal Studies (CLS) co-host a weekly seminar series, where invited speakers present work relevant to the research interests of the group. It will be particularly useful for those interested in gender stereotype, family economics, applied micro econometrics, social policy,


Useful links

About the Speaker

Valentina Tonei

Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Economics at University of Southampton

Valentina Tonei is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Economics at the School of Economic, Social and Political Science (ESPS) of the University of Southampton (UK), Department of Economics. She is also the Chair of the ESPS Athena Swan Committee and a member of the Royal Economic Society Women's Committee. Previously, Valentina was a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Department of Economics and Related Studies at the University of York (UK). Her primary research fields are Health Economics, Family Economics and Applied Micro Econometrics.

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