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LEAD Graduate School

The LEAD Graduate School at the of Tübingen

invites you to attend the Lecture by

Prof. Dr. Stefan C. Wolter (University of )

Competitiveness, Gender and Educational Preferences

Time: Tuesday, April 29th, 2014, 16.00 Uhr s.t. Venue: Festsaal Alte Aula, Münzgasse 30, 72070 Tübingen Note: The lecture will be held in English.

Abstract: Recent studies have shown that women tend to shy away from competitions and that this gender difference in the taste for competition can explain differences concerning educational preferences and choices. Wolter will present on the first results of a large-scale (N = 1500) replication of the competitiveness experiment developed by Niederle & Vesterlund (2010) and later applied to the educational choices of high- school in Amsterdam (Buser et al., 2012). Whereas previous studies have mostly studied small samples of high-ability students, the presented study includes results for a representative large sample of a whole cohort of 8th graders in the Canton of Berne. As pupils in have to make their first educational choices at the end of the 8th grade, the investigators were interested in knowing whether they would find for this group of pupils the same explanations for differences in the degree of competitiveness and whether these differences can explain (gender) differences in educational preferences. Furthermore, the presented study includes the results of several sensitivity tests of the competitiveness experiment itself.

Biography: Wolter studied and psychology at the University of Bern. Since 1999, he has served as the director of the Swiss Coordination Centre for Research in Education, a national agency of the federal and the cantonal education ministers. Concurrently, he has also served as the head of the Centre for Research in Economics of Education at the University of Bern since 2001; and since 2005, the co-director of the Leading House on the Economics of Education (together with Prof. U. Backes-Gellner of the ), a research initiative of the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation. Since 1999/2000, Wolter has represented Switzerland in the education policy committee of the OECD, and has been a governing board member of the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) of the OECD in Paris. Additionally, he is a research fellow of CESifo (Munich) and IZA (Bonn).

Suggested Readings:  Buser, T., Niederle, M. and Oosterbeek, H. (2012). Gender, Competitiveness and Career Choices, NBER Working Papers 18576, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. (Quarterly Journal of Economics, forthcoming).  Niederle, M. and Vesterlund, L. (2010). Explaining the Gender Gap in Math Test Scores: The Role of Competition, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2010, Vol. 24, Number 2, 129-144.

Contact: Jennifer Krautkremer, LEAD Graduate School, [email protected]