Effects of COVID-19 on gender gaps in educational outcomes of college students in Italy

The gendered impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been observed in many domains, such as labor market outcomes and mental health. One sector that was particularly disrupted by the pandemic was education, owing to the need to close educational institutions and move all learning activities online. In this paper, we investigate the impact of COVID-19 on the gender gap in university student performance, focusing on a large public university located in one of the European regions most affected by the first pandemic wave in 2020 (Lombardy, in Northern Italy). Despite concerns that the pandemic might have had a heavier toll on the educational outcomes of female students, our empirical analysis using administrative data on the whole student population shows that women were not more negatively affected than men by COVID-19 in terms of number of credits earned, and that in some college majors (in social sciences and humanities) they improved their GPA relative to men.