Gendered Preferences in Centralized School Choice: Evidence from Chile’s School Admission System

This paper studies gender differences in school-choice behavior under Chile’s Sistema de Admisión Escolar (SAE), a centralized system that records ranked preference lists before as signment. Using national 2025 student-school choice-set data, it asks whether applications sub mitted for female and male applicants weight school attributes differently within their submitted lists. The empirical strategy estimates a rank-ordered (exploded) logit model on each applicant’s true ranking, without padding short lists. The main result is a modest gender difference in the weight placed on school social composition, measured by the school-level share of non-priority students rather than by applicants’ own family background. Female applicants are somewhat more likely than comparable male applicants to rank relatively higher-SES schools earlier, with the pattern concentrated in secondary education. Cross-cohort estimates for 2017–2024 show that the pattern is not unique to 2025, and an admission-stage decomposition indicates that much of the admitted-school SES gap aligns with the composition of the schools applicants face. The contribution is measurement-based: the paper identifies where gendered ranking differences enter the SAE application process