IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/32350.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Information-Optional Policies and the Gender Concealment Gap

Author

Listed:
  • Christine L. Exley
  • Raymond Fisman
  • Judd B. Kessler
  • Louis-Pierre Lepage
  • Xiaomeng Li
  • Corinne Low
  • Xiaoyue Shan
  • Mattie Toma
  • Basit Zafar

Abstract

We analyze data from two universities that allowed students to replace a letter grade with “credit” on their transcript. At both schools, we observe a significant and substantial gender concealment gap: women are less likely than men to conceal grades, particularly grades that would harm their GPA. This gender concealment gap produces differential GPA gains from the policy with men benefiting nearly 50% more than women. Additional complementary data, including surveys and experiments with students and employers, suggest why women may conceal less: women may expect observers to have more negative inferences about their concealed grades.

Suggested Citation

  • Christine L. Exley & Raymond Fisman & Judd B. Kessler & Louis-Pierre Lepage & Xiaomeng Li & Corinne Low & Xiaoyue Shan & Mattie Toma & Basit Zafar, 2024. "Information-Optional Policies and the Gender Concealment Gap," NBER Working Papers 32350, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32350
    Note: ED LS
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w32350.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
    • J71 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor Discrimination - - - Hiring and Firing

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32350. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.