Gender Gap in Access to the Driving License: Experimental Evidence from France

In this article, we assess the gender difference in response from driving schools to a request for information about the requirements to pass the driving license. To this purpose, we created fictitious profiles for two young candidates seeking a driving license training, a woman and a man, who were similar in all other aspects. We conducted two waves of experiment on 290 driving schools randomly selected from an exhaustive list of French driving schools. The feedback received from driving schools that responded to both candidates is examined to investigate differences in treatment between the male and female applicants. Our analysis shows that driving schools propose a slightly significantly higher maximum number of hours of preparation for the road test when the candidate is a woman: on average, driving schools propose 1.5 more hours of training to women than to men. On the other hand, we do not find a significant gender difference in the price of the training offered and few differences in other variables related to the content of the response.