2012. “Girls, girls, girls: gender composition and female school choice

Gender segregation in the labor market may be partly explained by women’s reluctance to choose technical or male-dominated occupations, although the foundations for their career choices are certainly laid earlier, during education. Educational experts claim that female students are doing better in math and sci-ence and are more likely to choose those subjects if they are in single-sex classes. Possible explanations are the dominating behavior of boys in the classroom, un-equal treatment by teachers and the lack of role models and self-confidence of girls in male-dominated subjects. In this paper, we identify the causal impact of gender composition on school choice for female students, using register data covering 19 cohorts of compulsory school students from Linz, the 3rd largest city in Austria. We propose that girls are less likely to choose a female-dominated school type at the age of 14 after spending the previous years of secondary edu-cation in classes with a higher share of female students. The Austrian education system consists of a range of intermediate and higher vocational school types with different orientations, such as schools for domestic sciences or technical schools. We address the problem of endogenous school choice by using natural population variation in gender composition of adjacent cohorts within schools. The result of the study is clear-cut and survives a number of falsification and sensitivity checks. Females are less likely to choose a female-dominated school type and more likely to choose the technical school type if they were exposed to a higher share of girls in previous grades. Our paper contributes to the recent debate about coeducation either in certain subjects or at the school level