Gender stereotypes in the family

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

• QSS and CLS Seminar series
• UCL Social Research Institute
• Centre for Longitudinal Studies
• Quantitative Social Science