scholarly journals Reproduction of 'Gender Differences in the Choice of Major: The Importance of Female Role Models'

2021 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 226-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Porter ◽  
Danila Serra

We conducted a field experiment aimed at increasing the percentage of women majoring in economics. We exposed students enrolled in introductory classes to successful and charismatic women who majored in economics at the same university. The intervention significantly impacted female students’ enrollment in further economics classes, increasing their likelihood to major in economics by 8 percentage points. This is a large effect, given that only 9 percent of women were majoring in economics at baseline. Since the impacted women were previously planning to major in lower-earning fields, our low-cost intervention may have a positive effect on their future incomes. (JEL A22, C93, I23, I26, J16)


1978 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agnes N. O'Connell ◽  
◽  
Nancy Felipe Russo

Author(s):  
Regina Marler

Modernist, feminist, experimental: the terms we now most associate with Virginia Woolf all presuppose a break with conventions and a rejection of the status quo in art and power relations. Yet all her life, Virginia Woolf kept returning in memory to her childhood home, to the crowded Victorian family in which she was raised, where boys went to the best schools that Sir Leslie Stephen could afford, and girls, however clever or gifted, were shaped for charitable work, for motherhood, for marriage to prominent men. This obsessive turning back is a kind of pained nostalgia: a lament, a grievance, a comfort—and the engine of even her most avant-garde work. This chapter explores the traditions and assumptions of that potent childhood world, in part through the prism of three conservative female role models her mother, Julia Stephen, chose for her daughters: Mrs. Humphry Ward, Octavia Hill, and Florence Nightingale.


Feminismo/s ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 181
Author(s):  
Mirja Riggert

This paper intends to track the development of traditional feminist ideas through the analysis of three contemporary travel blogs. These traditional feminist concepts are to be seen in the construction of a collective female identity that enables transnational and transgenerational solidarity: by receiving and transmitting inspiration, shelter and encouragement among female travellers, the narrators in the blogs create a system of female authority. Within this system, female role models as well as maternal figures become points of reference that help to revalue female attributes. This concept shows allusions to the theory of difference feminism as it is presented in the «symbolic order of the mother» by Luisa Muraro. A similar approach of revaluating femininity happens through the orientation towards ‘Mother Nature’. By staging women’s ability to give birth, cultural ecofeminists like Susan Griffin intend to affirm a close bond between women and nature. This representation of an emphasised femininity becomes a central marker in the narratives of the blogs. While this agenda might be designed to counter gendered spaces and the traditional alienation of women within travel discourse, it is problematised by exclusionary and essentialist definitions of femininity that harden engendered binaries like masculinity/femininity or nature/culture.


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