According to a new study published by the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics and Political Science, women around the world are less likely to choose STEM majors, even in countries where girls outperform their male classmates.
For their study, the authors examined administrative data from 10 countries with centralized university admissions systems: Australia, Brazil, Chile, China, Finland, Greece, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, and Uganda. In these countries, universities admit students solely based on test scores and students’ preferences. This enabled the authors to examine each country’s gender differences in academic achievement, as well as gender differences in students’ choice of study.
According to the authors, these countries had significant variation in the gender representation of their top 10 percent of test scorers – a key indicator of students who typically go on to study STEM fields. Women are underrepresented among high-achieving students in Uganda, Chile, Brazil, and Taiwan, but overrepresented in Finland, Spain, Australia, Greece, and Sweden.
Despite these substantial differences in academic preparation, high-achieving women students are about 25 percentage points less likely than their male counterparts to pursue STEM majors in every country included in the study. This suggests that policies aimed at narrowing gender gaps in academic performance are not enough to close gender disparities in STEM representation.
“The striking consistency of the choice gap across highly heterogeneous contexts — spanning continents, levels of development, and cultural norms — suggests that deeper structural forces are at play,” the authors write. “This pattern emerges regardless of local institutions or gender norms.”
They continue, “Identifying the mechanisms underlying such a stable choice gap remains an important challenge. Preferences may reflect differences in how men and women value job attributes, expectations of discrimination, family-formation considerations, identity and belonging, or self-efficacy. Our findings imply that these forces operate globally rather than being context-specific.”