Assistant Professor of Economics Evelyn Skoy co-authored a paper published in the Southern Economic Journal, a publication of the Southern Economics Association. “Can Better Information Reduce College Gender Gaps? The Impact of Relative Grade Signals on Academic Outcomes for Students in Introductory Economics,” written with Francisca M. Antman and Nicholas E. Flores of the University of Colorado Boulder, presents the results of the authors’ study examining “the impacts of grades and information on gender gaps in college major and college dropout rates at a large public flagship university.”
The researchers found that “observational and experimental results suggest women are more responsive to introductory economics grades when deciding whether to major in economics, while men are more responsive to introductory economics grades when deciding whether to drop out of college. “Providing better information about grade distributions appears to only somewhat mitigate these impacts,” they said.
Their work also considered the extent to which aligning economics grading standards with those of competing disciplines would reduce the gender gap in economics graduates, but said this showed “relatively limited impacts.”
Funding for this research was provided by the National Bureau of Economic Research through a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation as part of the Undergraduate Women in Economics (UWE) Challenge.
Posted January 16, 2026
