Cécile Bonneau - Public Debate

Comment expliquer la sous-représentation des femmes dans les écoles d’ingénieurs les plus sélectives ?, IPP Policy Brief, n°115, May 2025

Although women now make up the majority of students in higher education in France, they remain significantly underrepresented in the STEM graduate schools (grandes écoles), particularly the most selective ones. Admission to these programs is based on competitive entrance exams, which are intended to ensure an objective selection based on academic performance. Preparing for these exams typically requires two to three years in a prep program (classe préparatoire aux grandes écoles (CPGE)), known for their academic rigor. The low proportion of women admitted to the most selective programs could stem from two main factors: performance gaps (either before or during CPGE, or at the time of the exam) or differences in preferences regarding which exams to take or which graduate schools to choose. Our analyses rule out both preferences and pre-CPGE performance as primary explanations, as these factors actually tend to favor women. The core explanation lies in a progressive reversal of the performance gap between women and men during the years spent in CPGE, especially in the most competitive and selective tracks, known as “étoile” classes. This decline is compounded by a slight disadvantage for women on the day of the entrance exam itself, which also contributes—though to a lesser extent—to their underrepresentation in the most selective STEM graduate schools

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Media Coverage : France Inter, Le Nouvel Obs, Challenges, France info, 20 minutes, La Tribune, le Figaro Etudiant (1), le Figaro Etudiant (2)

Dépenses d’enseignement supérieur : quelles disparités selon le genre des étudiants ?, IPP Policy Brief, n°83, October 2022

Thanks to new data on the cost of higher education in France, combined with a survey on young adults, this note documents the disparities in higher education spending by gender in France. Due to a strong under-representation of women in the most well-resourced fields of study (classes préparatoires aux grandes écoles, university institutes of technology, grandes écoles, etc.) as well as in scientific disciplines - which are more costly due to higher student-teacher ratios - higher education spending on female students is 18 percent lower than that allocated to their male counterparts. These disparities are not explained by different lengths of study but by different orientation choices in terms of tracks and fields of study.

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Media Coverage : Le Monde, Libé, Médiapart, Le Mouv Radio, Madmoizelle, TF1 Info, Alternatives Économiques, L'Etudiant

Enseignement supérieur : un accès inégal selon le revenu des parents, avec Sébastien Grobon, Focus CAE N° 076-2021, December 2021

In this focus, we quantify the extent of inequality in access to higher education and to various fields of study according to parental income, and we compare the level of inequality to that observed in the United States. We then observe how these inequalities related to parental income are articulated with those from parents' occupation and degree. Finally, we quantify the regressivity of public spending on young adults, a regressivity that is mainly due to inequalities in access to higher education.

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Media Coverage : L'Obs, Le Monde, Le Point, AEF info, Challenges, Les Echos, Libération, Times Higher Education, France Culture, Alternatives Economiques

Quelle démocratisation des grandes écoles depuis le milieu des années 2000 ? (with Pauline Charousset, Julien Grenet and Georgia Thebault), IPP Report n°30, 300 p., January 2021

This report documents, as precisely as possible, the evolution of recruitment to the classes préparatoires and the grandes écoles since the mid-2000s. The study favors a quantitative approach based on a very rich set of administrative data that have not been systematically exploited until now. These data are used to characterize the evolution of the profile of students in these programs according to several dimensions: their social origin, their gender, their geographic origin and their previous schooling.

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Grandes écoles: quelle « ouverture » depuis le milieu des années 2000 ? (with Pauline Charousset, Julien Grenet and Georgia Thebault), IPP Policy Brief, n°61, January 2021

Using a rich new dataset, this policy brief documents the evolution of recruitment for France’s Grandes Écoles since the mid-2000s, according to various characteristics: social composition, geographical origin of students, and gender distribution. Despite the "opening up" measures implemented by some Grandes Écoles in an attempt to diversify their student profiles, their recruitment base has remained very narrow and has hardly changed over the past 15 years. While enrollment has increased significantly in this period, these elite higher education institutions have remained almost entirely out of reach to students from disadvantaged social backgrounds, the share of students from outside the Paris region has not increased, and female students remain underrepresented. This persistent inequality of access to the Grandes Écoles is only partly explained by the differences in academic performance between the groups in question. It has its source upstream in the lack of diversity in the recruitment for preparatory classes and post-baccalaureate schools. The inability of measures implemented since the mid-2000s to initiate a democratization of the Grandes Écoles highlights the limits of the approach that has been favored up to now: a proliferation of local initiatives, with no real national coordination and very little evaluation. This failure invites us to rethink the levers that could be employed to diversify recruitment for selective courses and to encourage greater circulation of elites.

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How Have Inequalities in Educational Spending in the United States Evolved Over the Past Five Decades? WID.world Issue Brief 2020/01, March 2020

Are educational spending in the US more or less equally distributed than in the past? This briefs aims to describe the concentration of investments in education both for K-12 and for higher education in the US from 1970 to 2017. Even if the distribution of education spending is less unequal than the one of income or even wages, these spending are still very unequally distributed and, like for income and wages, inequalities have significantly increased over the past four decades, due to spending in higher education. Indeed, the top 10% of students for whom the most is spent used to have 28% of the total amount of instructional expenditure in higher education in 1970 and now have more than 36%. Inequalities in educational investments are coming from two sources: unequal length of studies and unequal spending per grade, the latter being the main driver of the concentration observed. As a matter of fact, if everyone were to have the same educational attainment, the level of inequalities would almost be the same. The only way to reduce significantly the concentration of spending on education would be to equalize spending within each grade across districts and universities.

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