Time: Dec. 3 (Fri.), 14:00 – 15:30

Title: Home Economics and Women’s gateway to science

About the speaker:

Yiling Zhao is an assistant professor at School of Economics, Peking University. She works on economic history and labor economics. She received her Ph.D from Northwestern University in 2020.

Abstract:

Women are underrepresented in STEM, but they have fair representations in biological sciences. We propose that women entered biological sciences because they were exposed to these subjects in large numbers through collegiate home economics in the early twentieth century. Home economics was developed in the context of the prevailing germ theory and was designed as a feminine parallel to agriculture studies at land-grant universities. The unique historical circumstances and institutional setup tied home economic curricula closely to biological sciences. Using college-level data from the Commissioners of Education reports, we establish a causal relationship between home economics and women’s enrollment in science majors in the cross-section. We further compiled a panel of student enrollment by majors from 1910-1940 with data collected from various college yearbooks. In a DID framework, we show that the presence of home economics led to a higher proportion of women choosing a major in science.