Are women less persistent? Evidence from submissions to a nationwide meeting of economics

Female under-representation in high-profile career positions has relevant impacts on firms' outcomes, research topics, and public policies. In the academic profession, women's participation decreases as they evolve in their careers. To understand the lack of women in economics in Brazilian academia, we investigate the decision to submit papers to the largest conference in the country (Brazilian Meeting of Economics, or ANPEC Meetings), an important achievement in the profession. We explore a novel panel dataset of researchers and match them with web-scraped data of their résumés to test gender differences in the probability of submitting an article one year after having a paper (same or new) rejected in the previous year. Our findings suggest that women desist 2.9% points more than men when facing rejection. We also find evidence that younger women give up more and that the quality of the undergraduate program relates to the gender gap in the likelihood of desisting. Finally, we argue that more competitive women may self-select into higher-quality institutions.