Gender Differences in High-Stakes Performance and College Admission Policies

The Gale-Shapley algorithm is one of the most popular college allocation mechanisms around the world. A crucial policy question in its setting is designing admission priorities for students, understanding how they disadvantage certain demographic groups, and whether these differences relate to differences in college performance potential. Studying a policy change in Spain, we find a negative effect of increasing the weight of standardized high-stakes exams on female college admission grades, driven by students expected to be at the top. The impact on admission grades does not affect enrollment, but the percentage of female students in the most selective degrees declines, along with their career prospects. Using data on the college performance of prereform cohorts, we find that female students most likely to lose from the reform tend to do better in college than male students expected to benefit from the reform. The results show that rewarding high-stakes performance in selection processes may come along with gender differences unrelated to the determinants of subsequent performance.