articles

Breaking barriers

Women in high school, 1882–1919

The purpose of the paper is to:

• demonstrate a practical application of state-of-art machine learning methods to extract a rich level of information from historic records
• propose a more detailed model for measuring human capital, which more closely charts attributes and competencies at the individual level
• document trends in educational attainment in Norway/Scandinavia during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

As a specific example, we consider differences based on gender, once women were permitted to attend high school and university in the late nineteenth century. To what extent did male and female students exhibit different trends in educational attainment?

Descriptives

• What trends do we observe in what women study?
• In which fields are women most represented — and does this change over time?
• Are there differences in the performance of male and female students by course/field? (For example, are there differences between men and women in the distribution of high school grades at the subject level?)

• Christian Møller Dahl
  • Professor
  • University of Southern Denmark
• Nick Ford
  • PhD student
  • Lund University
• Kristin Ranestad
  • Associate Professor
  • University of Oslo, Lund University
• Paul Sharp
  • Professor
  • University of Southern Denmark
• Christian Emil Westermann
  • PhD student
  • University of Southern Denmark