Australia

The two percentage-point gaps for Australia are shown next to the unweighted mean across settings. Both are defined as female minus male. A negative choice gap means that among students who have already cleared the same academic bar, women are less likely than men to rank a STEM program first.

The table summarizes features of the admission system that bear on the construction and interpretation of the analysis. Untranscribed values are marked as pending.

Australian states use separate clearinghouses that operate under similar rules. This study covers the clearinghouse in the state of Victoria, which holds 25% of the national population and, per the paper's Data section, is a strong proxy for the nation. Each student submits a ranked ordered list of college-major combinations to the clearinghouse, the Victorian Tertiary Admissions Centre, which allocates them to the highest-ranked combination for which they are eligible. Eligibility is based on the student's rank in the applicant cohort, the Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank (ATAR).

The ATAR is a percentile rank built from scaled subject scores, combining results across a variety of subjects, with a possible small adjustment based on the student's affirmative action status. Because two students may have zero subjects in common, the ATAR serves as the common measure of academic performance across applicants. A high school subject result itself combines an end-of-academic-year exam, administered in November, with the results of tests taken throughout the last year of high school.

An applicant may list up to 12 programs, chosen from about 1,078 programs offered in a typical year across the 21 institutions inside the centralized system. Like the other systems in the study, the mechanism belongs to the deferred acceptance family, which gives students little incentive to misreport and lets the submitted list be read as an ordering over the programs the student was willing to enter.

The application calendar runs across the final year of high school and the following southern-hemisphere summer. Subject results accumulate through the last year of high school and are combined with an end-of-academic-year exam administered in November. Students receive their ATAR in December and finalize their ranked list only after that release, so every list is submitted with the score in hand and can respond to where the student actually stands. Offers of admission are made in January, in offer rounds, and admitted students then have a few weeks to enroll.

Centralized admissions cover every university in Australia; the paper groups it with Greece and Sweden as the settings with full institutional coverage. In the Victorian system this means all 21 institutions admit through the platform, so there is no decentralized outside option to document, which is a strength of this setting: a student who wants a university place in the system must appear on the platform.

Across the 21 institutions, roughly 1,078 college-major combinations are offered in a typical year, of which an applicant may rank up to 12. Tuition is charged among participating universities, and financial aid is available.

The performance measure is the ATAR, a percentile rank built from scaled subject scores. It is the rank the clearinghouse itself publishes and allocates on, and it is constructed to be comparable across students who may share no subjects in common. Performance groups, including the top decile that anchors the main analysis, are formed within setting and cohort over the full distribution of score holders.

More than one candidate ranking variant is available in the Australian data. The ATAR is used throughout; a variant ranking students on English and mathematics results only is not comparable with the measures used in the other settings and is not used here.

The measure is constructed identically for women and men. The country narrative notes that the ATAR can carry a small adjustment based on a student's affirmative action status; no documented component of the measure differs by sex.

The data cover all students applying to tertiary institutions through the Victorian clearinghouse in the 2009 and 2010 application cohorts. That is 77,648 score holders in total, the full distribution against which performance groups are defined. About 38.8 thousand students apply per year, and women are 55.8% of applicants.

The top decile contains 7,748 students: 4,158 women and 3,590 men, so women are 53.7% of the high-achieving group. Women are over-represented at the top of this distribution relative to parity, meaning the pipeline gap runs in women's favor in this setting.

Additional record-level exclusions and field mappings are documented in the replication code.

Admission rules in this setting do not differ by sex: the paper's Table A.III comparison of the ten systems documents no sex-conditional admission rule for Australia, and, as the Data section notes for the settings without a categorical gate, eligibility runs through academic performance alone. The small affirmative-action adjustment the ATAR can carry is not documented as differing by sex.

The data come from the Victorian Tertiary Admissions Centre, the clearinghouse that processes the applications. The records are individual-level and cover all students applying to tertiary institutions in 2009 and 2010. The variables include performance in English and math subjects, applicants' ranked choices, gender, and parental education; the file also carries more than one candidate ranking variant, of which the ATAR, the rank the clearinghouse publishes and allocates on, is the one used in the analysis.

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