For her paper “Impact of emergency contraception distribution on female university enrollment in Chile” our PhD student Catalina Lauer was distinguished with the best PhD paper award at the 2024 Gender Gaps Conference (Warsaw, Poland, September 13/24).
The paper examines the influence of the emergency contraceptive pill (ECP) availability on the higher education enrollment of female high school graduates in Chile and employs a generalized difference-in-differences approach to account for the non-uniform implementation and withdrawal of ECP distribution across municipalities between 2011 and 2015. The findings indicate an increase in university enrollment among recent female high school graduates with improved access to ECP, elevating enrollment by approximately one percentage point, which represents a 30% of the gender enrollment gap during the studied period. The paper contributes to the literature by demonstrating how health policy interventions can have significant effects on educational attainment and gender equity in access to higher education.
