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Evaluation Criteria and Women's Attainment of Elite STEM Education: Evidence from College Admission Records

By on June 23, 2025 in Articles

Wei-hsin Yu, Kuo-Hsien Su

Sociological Science June 23, 2025
10.15195/v12.a16

Abstract

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Research on women’s underrepresentation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields rarely addresses the roles of institutional gatekeepers and their screening criteria. Using full application records of the most prestigious university in Taiwan, we examine how the assessment criteria used by departments to determine admissions shape women’s relative chance of entering elite STEM programs. Results from department fixed-effect models indicate that male-dominated STEM programs actually rate female applicants’ written application materials and interviews higher. Female applicants are still less likely admitted to such programs than males because many STEM departments also use major-specific tests, which are not strictly curriculum based and impose great competitive pressure on selected students. Even the highest-achieving female students with a strong STEM interest perform worse than males in this type of tests, especially when the tests are given by male-dominated departments. Because of this gender performance gap, female students’ chances of being admitted to elite STEM programs continue to be obstructed even as the college admission system became holistic and incorporated assessment criteria that could favor females.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Wei-hsin Yu: Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles
E-mail: whyu@soc.ucla.edu

Kuo-Hsien Su: Department of Sociology, National Taiwan University
E-mail: khsu@ntu.edu.tw

Acknowledgments: We thank National Taiwan University for sharing application records with the authors for the purpose of academic research. We also acknowledge the valuable input from Yu Xie at an earlier stage of this research project and a grant from the Asia Pacific Center at UCLA awarded to the first author.

Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: The authors received special permission to use the confidential data of applications of National Taiwan University (NTU) for this publication and are prohibited from sharing the data. Access to the NTU application data should be requested directly from the Office of Admission under NTU’s Office of Academic Affairs (https://www.aca.ntu.edu.tw/w/acaEN/Contact). However, all of the code files and ancillary data generated from publicly available sources are stored in Dataverse and can be obtained through https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/KUVUS8.

  • Citation: Yu, Wei-hsin, Kuo-Hsien Su. 2025. “Evaluation Criteria and Women’s Attainment of Elite STEM Education: Evidence from College Admission Records” Sociological Science 12:357-387.
  • Received: February 24, 2025
  • Accepted: May 1, 2025
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Elizabeth Bruch
  • DOI: 10.15195/v12.a16

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Self-Citation, Cumulative Advantage, and Gender Inequality in Science

By on May 6, 2020 in Articles

Pierre Azoulay, Freda B. Lynn

Sociological Science May 6, 2020
10.15195/v7.a7

Abstract
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In science, self-citation is often interpreted as an act of self-promotion that (artificially) boosts the visibility of one’s prior work in the short term, which could then inflate professional authority in the long term. Recently, in light of research on the gender gap in self-promotion, two large-scale studies of publications examine if women self-cite less than men. But they arrive at conflicting conclusions; one concludes yes whereas the other, no. We join the debate with an original study of 36 cohorts of life scientists (1970–2005) followed through 2015 (or death or retirement). We track not only the rate of self-citation per unit of past productivity but also the likelihood of self-citing intellectually distant material and the rate of return on self-citations with respect to a host of major career outcomes, including grants, future citations, and job changes. With comprehensive, longitudinal data, we find no evidence whatsoever of a gender gap in self-citation practices or returns. Men may very well be more aggressive self-promoters than women, but this dynamic does not manifest in our sample with respect to self-citation practices. Implications of our null findings are discussed, particularly with respect to gender inequality in scientific careers more broadly.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Pierre Azoulay: MIT Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and National Bureau of Economic Research
E-mail: pazoulay@mit.edu

Freda B. Lynn: Department of Sociology and Criminology, University of Iowa
E-mail: freda-lynn@uiowa.edu

Acknowledgements: Address all correspondence to freda-lynn@uiowa.edu. Azoulay acknowledges the financial support of the National Science Foundation through its SciSIP Program (Award SBE-1460344). Soomi Kim provided exceptional research assistance. We thank Ezra Zuckerman for useful discussions. The authors contributed equally, and all errors are our own.

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Azoulay, Pierre, and Freda B. Lynn. 2020. “Self-Citation, Cumulative Advantage, and Gender Inequality in Science.” Sociological Science 7:152-186.
  • Received: March 23, 2020
  • Accepted: March 29, 2020
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Olav Sorenson
  • DOI: 10.15195/v7.a7


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The Rise of Programming and the Stalled Gender Revolution

By on April 30, 2019 in Articles

Siwei Cheng, Bhumika Chauhan, Swati Chintala

Sociological Science, April 30, 2019
10.15195/v6.a13

Abstract
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Despite remarkable progress toward gender equality over the past half-century, the stalled convergence in the gender wage gap after the mid-1990s remains a puzzle. This study provides new insights into this puzzle by conducting the first large-scale investigation of the uneven impact of the rise of programming in the labor market for men and women since the mid-1990s. We argue that the increasing reliance on programming has favored men’s economic status relative to women’s and therefore may help explain the slow convergence of the gender wage gap. We differentiate between two effects: (1) the composition effect, wherein men experience a greater employment growth in programming-intensive occupations relative to women, and (2) the price effect, wherein the wage returns to programming intensity increase more for men than women. Our empirical analysis documents a strong relationship between the rise of programming and the slow convergence of the gender wage gap among college graduates. Counterfactual simulations indicate that the absence of the composition and price effects would have reduced the gender wage gap over the past two decades by an additional 14.70 percent. These findings call attention to the role gender institutions play in shaping the uneven labor market impact of technological change.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Siwei Cheng: Department of Sociology, New York University
E-mail: siwei.cheng@nyu.edu

Bhumika Chauhan: Department of Sociology, New York University
E-mail: bhumikachauhan@nyu.edu

Swati Chintala: Department of Sociology, New York University
E-mail: swati.chintala@nyu.edu

Acknowledgements: Direct all correspondence to Siwei Cheng, assistant professor of sociology at New York University (295 Lafayette St, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10012). The authors acknowledge support from the Summer Research Fund at the Department of Sociology at New York University. The second and third authors contributed equally to the project. We thank Paula England, Kathleen Gerson, Claudia Goldin, Mike Hout, and Yu Xie for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. This article was presented at the Harvard University Social Demography Seminar. All remaining errors are our own.

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Cheng, Siwei, Bhumika Chauhan, and Swati Chintala. 2019. “The Rise of Programming and the Stalled Gender Revolution.” Sociological Science 6:321-351.
  • Received: December 18, 2018
  • Accepted: March 6, 2019
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Kim Weeden
  • DOI: 10.15195/v6.a13


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Degrees of Difference: Gender Segregation of U.S. Doctorates by Field and Program Prestige

By on February 6, 2017 in Articles

Kim A. Weeden, Sarah Thébaud, Dafna Gelbgiser

Sociological Science, February 6, 2017
DOI 10.15195/v4.a6

Abstract
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Women earn nearly half of doctoral degrees in research fields, yet doctoral education in the United States remains deeply segregated by gender. We argue that in addition to the oft-noted segregation of men and women by field of study, men and women may also be segregated across programs that differ in their prestige. Using data on all doctorates awarded in the United States from 2003 to 2014, field-specific program rankings, and field-level measures of math and verbal skills, we show that (1) “net” field segregation is very high and strongly associated with field-level math skills; (2) “net” prestige segregation is weaker than field segregation but still a nontrivial form of segregation in doctoral education; (3) women are underrepresented among graduates of the highest-and to a lesser extent, the lowest-prestige programs; and (4) the strength and pattern of prestige segregation varies substantially across fields, but little of this variation is associated with field skills.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Kim A. Weeden: Department of Sociology, Cornell University
Email: kw74@cornell.edu

Sarah Thébaud: Department of Sociology, University of California – Santa Barbara
Email: sthebaud@gmail.com

Dafna Gelbgiser: Center for the Study of Inequality, Cornell University
Email: dg432@cornell.edu

Acknowledgements: We thank Maria Charles, Tom DiPrete, Jesper Sørensen, and Ezra Zuckerman for comments on an earlier draft of this article. Dr. Gelbgiser’s postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell University’s Center for the Study of Inequality is supported by a generous grant from The Atlantic Philanthropies.

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Weeden, Kim A., Sarah Thébaud, and Dafna Gelbgiser. 2017. “Degrees of Difference: Gender Segregation of U.S. Doctorates by Field and Program Prestige.” Sociological Science 4: 123-150.
  • Received: November 19, 2016
  • Accepted: December 2, 2016
  • Editors: Sarah Soule
  • DOI: 10.15195/v4.a6


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