IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zur/econwp/474.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Disconnecting women: gender disparities in the impact of online instruction

Author

Listed:
  • Xiaoyue Shan
  • Ulf Zölitz
  • Uschi Backes-Gellner

Abstract

We study the impact of online instruction with a field experiment that randomly assigns 1,344 university students to different proportions of online and in-person lectures in multiple introductory courses. Increased online instruction leaves men’s exam performance unaffected but significantly lowers women’s performance, particularly in math-intensive courses. Online instruction also reduces women’s longer-run performance and increases their study dropout. Exploring mechanisms, we find that women exposed to more online lectures report greater difficulty in connecting with peers, less engaging instructors, and lower course satisfaction. Our findings suggest that shifting toward more online instruction may disproportionally harm women.

Suggested Citation

  • Xiaoyue Shan & Ulf Zölitz & Uschi Backes-Gellner, 2025. "Disconnecting women: gender disparities in the impact of online instruction," ECON - Working Papers 474, Department of Economics - University of Zurich.
    • Handle: RePEc:zur:econwp:474
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/279463/1/econwp474.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Online instruction; field experiment; gender disparities;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
    • I23 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Higher Education; Research Institutions
    • C93 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Field Experiments

    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:zur:econwp:474. 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: Severin Oswald (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/seizhch.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.