Punishing “gender deviants”? Women born in the year of the white horse and college selectivity

Belief in the Chinese zodiac, a cultural belief widely held in East Asian cultures, posits that people are fated to have different traits according to the zodiac animal attached to their birth year. As a white horse is culturally associated with masculine traits, Korean women born in the White Horse year are presumed to be argumentative, headstrong, and born with “too much” Yin energy. In this study, we analyze a nationally representative sample of Korean college graduates to examine whether and how being born in the White Horse year, thereby being chronically exposed to gender stereotype-violating stigma, affects women's higher educational attainment. Our difference-in-differences models show that White Horse women, on average, entered colleges of lower selectivity than did non-White Horse women, whereas no such disadvantage was attached to White Horse men. The results also suggest that, although the negative impact of the White Horse stigma is more salient for socioeconomically disadvantaged White Horse women than for their advantaged counterparts, the difference between the two groups does not reach statistical significance. We discuss the implications of these findings with emphasis on the role of sheer presumptions about gendered expectations in reproducing social disadvantages for women.