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.本研究旨在评估驾校针对考取驾照相关要求咨询的回复行为中的性别差异。为此，我们为两名寻求驾照培训的年轻申请者构建了虚构个人档案——一女一男，二者除性别外其余各项特征均保持一致。我们从法国驾校的全量名录中随机抽取290家驾校开展两轮实验，对同时回复两名申请者的驾校所提供的反馈进行分析，以探究针对男性与女性申请者的接待差异。分析结果显示，当申请者为女性时，驾校建议的道路驾驶考试准备最长学时略微显著更高：平均而言，驾校为女性申请者提供的培训学时比男性多1.5小时。另一方面，我们未发现培训报价存在显著性别差异，且回复内容的其他相关变量也鲜有差异。