girls took place via a change in their subtrack choices. One possible explanation for this result that the available data did not allow us to test, is that our intervention motivated female students to search for more detailed information about the wages related to different careers and, as a result, opted for subtracks with higher expected returns but potentially more demanding. Since 2005 Mexico has a nationwide employment observatory ( _Observatorio Laboral_ - OLA) that provides updated information on the main labor market outcomes of the different careers - including average wage and gender composition, and it can be easily accessed through a webpage.<sup>25</sup> It is unclear why boys did not change their behavior, in spite of a more optimistic view about their returns to education. Following our simple conceptual framework, there are two potential explanations: 1) the distance between the perceived returns and the statistic provided as part of the intervention differs for boys and girls; 2) boys and girls have different time preferences.

Only students with expected returns below the statistic provided as part of the intervention should increase effort and improve their results. At the baseline boys and girls do not statistically differ in the probability of reporting an expected earning below the average earning estimated with the ENOE (72% and 70% respectively), and therefore it is unlikely that difference in the baseline perceptions about future earnings can drive the gender differential effect of the information package on proxies for effort, and learning outcomes.

Lower time discount should lead to an increased impact of the program on effort. There is increasing evidence that men and women differ in time discount.<sup>26</sup> In the baseline survey we elicited information on time preference using a framework similar to the one used by Rubalcava et al. (2009) and described in section 3.2. Consistent with their results, we find that 20% of boys, as opposed to 15% of girls, would prefer accepting $3,000 MX today, regardless of the amount offered in one year time. We define these individuals as the "high time discount" students, and "low time discount" as all students willing to give up the $3,000 MX today in exchange for a larger sum in the future. We study whether the treatment effect

> 25According to the public information provided by the OLA in 2014, a nurse, one of the most common professional outcomes for students choosing the chemistry and biology subtrack, receives on average $8,617 MX per month and 87% of the nurses are female. The average wage for a clerk is $10,215 MX and $10,212 MX for an accountant, two common outcomes for those opting for an economics and administration subtrack. Among clerks and accountants, women account for 49.3% and 46.4% of the total employees respectively. Careers such as engineering, that are common outcomes for those taking the physics and mathematics subtrack, feature on average the highest wages but an extremely low proportion of women. The average wages for a mining engineer and an automotive one are $19,838 MX and $14,036 MX per month respectively, but the percentage of women employed are 11.4% and 1.3%, respectively.

> 26See, among others, Dittrich and Leipold (2014) and Bauer et al. (2012). For Mexico, Rubalcava et al. (2009), using direct evidence on time preference from the Mexican Family Life Survey, finds that women have lower time discount than men.

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