Catherine Rampell on the gender gap in college majors

Over at the Washington Post, Catherine Rampell published an article discussing how women who earned B's in an introductory economics course were less likely to pursue a degree in economics.

Via the Washington Post & Claudia Goldin/Harvard University

Rampell then references Claudia Goldin, an economics professor at Harvard, who found that "Women who received a B in Econ 101, for example, were about half as likely as women who received A’s to stick with the discipline. The same discouragement gradient didn’t exist for men."

How could this be? Goldin suggests the following, as quoted from the article:

“Maybe women just don’t want to get things wrong,” Goldin hypothesized. “They don’t want to walk around being a B-minus student in something. They want to find something they can be an A student in. They want something where the professor will pat them on the back and say ‘You’re doing so well!’ ”
“Guys,” she added, “don’t seem to give two damns.” 

Most of us probably won't be very satisfied with this answer. 

Rampell then transitions into rhetorically asking why - on the other hand - are men who earn B's not dissuaded from pursuing an economics degree. I'm not sure how many of us will buy the argument that "Male students could be more overconfident — effectively, college bros shrug off gentleman’s C’s" either. 

If Rampell releases a follow up to her first article, I'm hoping she mentions another NYT blogpost that discusses a recent study about stereotypes on gender and their impact on careers (and thus, we'd presume, career choice). Unfortunately, the full study is not available without cost, but the blogpost incorporates results from the data which presumably are significant. 

I'd be more convinced by articulate numbers than conjectures on specific gender tendencies, and I'm sure the women who Catherine Rampell is trying to convince to "embrace the B's" would be too.