On the Origins of Gender Gaps in Education : Stereotype as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Using reading performance data from a randomized controlled trial of 5,224 fifth-grade students in east China, this paper provides a novel test for the hypothesis that evoking a gender stereotype creates gender gaps in education through self-fulfilling prophecies. We find that without intervention, boys performed worse than girls in reading tests. Besides, evoking a gender stereotype by indicating the expected outperformance of girls over boys in reading enlarged the gender gap by harming boys but not affecting girls. Finally, the heterogeneous analysis showed that students from environments with biased gender role beliefs were more susceptible to the intervention