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Stay-at-Home Peer Mothers and Gender Norms: Short-run Effects on Educational Outcomes

Increased exposure to gender-role information affects a girl's educational performance. Utilizing the classroom randomization in Chinese middle schools, we find that the increased presence of stay-at-home peer mothers significantly reduces a girl's performance in mathematics. This exposure also cultivates gendered attitudes towards mathematics and STEM professions. The influence of peer mothers increases with network density and when the girl has a distant relationship with her parents. As falsification tests against unobserved confounding factors, we find that the exposure to stay-at-home peer mothers does not affect boys' performance, nor do we find that stay-at-home peer fathers affect girls' outcomes.

Keywords
Cultural transmission, Gender identity, Gender norms, Role models
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/ctxd-k539

EdWorkingPaper suggested citation:

Chung, Bobby, Liwen Chen, and Guangwha Wang. (). Stay-at-Home Peer Mothers and Gender Norms: Short-run Effects on Educational Outcomes. (EdWorkingPaper: 22-672). Retrieved from Annenberg Institute at Brown University: https://doi.org/10.26300/ctxd-k539

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