  Efforts to promote equity and inclusion using evidence-based approaches are
vital to correct long-standing societal inequities that have disadvantaged
women and discouraged them from pursuing studies, e.g., in many STEM
disciplines. We use 10 years of institutional data at a large public university
to investigate trends in the majors that men and women declare, drop after
declaring, and earn degrees in as well as the GPA of the students who drop or
earn a degree. We find that the majors with the lowest number of students also
have the highest rates of attrition. Moreover, we find alarming GPA trends,
e.g., women who drop majors on average earn higher grades than men who drop
those majors, and in some STEM majors, women who drop the majors were earning
comparable grades to men who persist in those majors. These quantitative
findings call for a better understanding of the reasons students drop a major
and for making learning environments equitable and inclusive.
