Paper & citation
The Global Gender Gap in STEM Applications: Pipeline vs. Choice
A Short Communication by 13 authors across 12 institutions, using administrative microdata from ten centralized university admission systems.
Abstract
Women make up only 35% of global STEM graduates, a share unchanged for a decade. We separate gender differences in academic preparation (the pipeline) from gender differences in application decisions (the choice gap) across ten centralized university admissions systems, where eligibility is set by academic performance and assignment runs through variants of deferred acceptance, under which students have little incentive to misreport. Restricting attention to high-achieving students, for whom access constraints are least likely to bind, isolates application behavior from the most obvious barriers. The pipeline gap varies widely, from female disadvantage in Uganda to female advantage in Sweden, and broadly tracks labor-market gender parity. The choice gap does not: it is large and negative in every setting, and even among top scorers women are about 24 percentage points less likely than men to rank a STEM program first, a gap exceeding 20 points in eight of the ten. The pattern holds when STEM is counted anywhere on the list rather than only first. The gap is large enough that closing the pipeline gap entirely would still leave high-achieving STEM applicants majority male, between 57% and 75%, in every setting we study.
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Replication materials
Code and the derived, non-identifying aggregates that generate every figure on this site.
pending · repository link
Authors
Isaac Ahimbisibwe
Baylor University, USA
Adam Altmejd
SOFI, Stockholm University, Sweden
Georgy Artemov
University of Melbourne, Australia
Andrés Barrios-Fernández
Universidad de los Andes, Chile
Aspasia Bizopoulou
VATT Institute for Economic Research, Finland
Martti Kaila
University of Glasgow, UK
Jin-Tan Liu
National Taiwan University, Taiwan
Rigissa Megalokonomou
Monash University, Australia
José Montalbán
Swedish Institute for Social Research, Stockholm University, Sweden
Christopher Neilsoncorresponding
Yale University, USA
Sebastián Otero
Columbia University, USA
Jintao Sun
Renmin University, China
Xiaoyang Ye
Amazon, USA
Affiliations are reproduced from the manuscript title page.
Citation
@article{ahimbisibwe_gender_stem,
title = {The Global Gender Gap in STEM Applications: Pipeline vs. Choice},
author = {Ahimbisibwe, Isaac and Altmejd, Adam and Artemov, Georgy and
Barrios-Fern\'andez, Andr\'es and Bizopoulou, Aspasia and Kaila, Martti and
Liu, Jin-Tan and Megalokonomou, Rigissa and Montalb\'an, Jos\'e and
Neilson, Christopher and Otero, Sebasti\'an and Sun, Jintao and Ye, Xiaoyang},
year = {},
journal = {},
note = {Short Communication}
}Year, journal and DOI fields are intentionally empty until the manuscript record exists.
Data access
The analysis uses administrative records supplied by ten national agencies and admission authorities. Most of these records cannot be redistributed by the research team under any circumstances, so a reader who wants the underlying microdata has to request it from the holding agency directly.
What can be shared from this project:
- The derived aggregates behind every figure and table on this site — shares, gaps and counts by setting, threshold, outcome and field — as CSV.
- The analysis code that turns agency extracts into those aggregates.
- The documentation on each country page: rules, calendars, performance-measure construction, and sample definitions.
What cannot:
- Student-level records, ranked lists, or any file from which an individual could be identified.
- Agency extracts covered by data-use agreements that prohibit onward transfer, which is the majority of the ten.
The per-agency conditions differ, and the exact terms and contact routes belong on each country page under “Data provenance and access”. pending · per-agency access terms