Where Are All the Female Finance Majors? An Examination of Gender and Performance in Undergraduate Corporate Finance

Abstract

Using a sample of 592 business students over the period 2009 to 2018, we investigate why there are so few undergraduate female students choosing finance as a major. We find that females, on average, scored higher in their first college math course by almost 2% than males, but there is no significant difference in the grades between female and male students in corporate finance. However, our results show that the odds of a female choosing a finance major is 0.4, which means that male students are 2.5 times more likely to choose finance as their major. Also, a 10% increase in the student’s grade in his/her math class increases the student’s grade in corporate finance by 6%. This underscores the theory that better performance in quantitative courses leads to better performance in finance.