Female underrepresentation in high-profile career positions has relevant impacts on firms’ outcomes and public policies. In the academic profession, women’s participation decreases as they evolve in their career. To understand the lack of women in the field of economics in Brazil, we investigate the decision to submit papers to the largest conference in the country (Brazilian Meeting of Economics), as an important achievement in the profession. We explore a novel panel dataset of researchers and match them with web-scraped data of their r´esum´es to test gender differences in the probability of submitting an article one year after having an article (same or new) rejected in the previous year. Our findings suggest that women desist 5.9 percentage 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 matters to determine the difference in the desistance rate between men and women. We hypothesize that higher quality institutions might self-select women who are more competitive.

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