Hard times for girls in STEM. The heterogeneous effects of distance learning on student achievement during the Covid pandemic

In this paper, we study the impact of distance learning on student achievement in higher education by exploiting the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent shift from in-person to online teaching during the second semester of the 2019/2020 academic year in Italy. We estimate a diff-in diff model using administrative data for different cohorts of students from a large university located in Bergamo in Northern Italy. Our results show that online teaching is associated with a lower number of credits and passed exams and with an increase in the average grade. Additional analyses provide evidence for significant heterogeneity by field of study and gender, with women in engineering being those who suffered the most from the shift to online teaching. Survey evidence points to gender differences in study-life balance and reduced relations with both peers and teachers in explaining the results.