China

The two percentage-point gaps for China 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.

China matches students to tertiary education places through an admissions system centralized at the province-track level: students compete for college-major vacancies only with peers from the same provincial-level admission unit and academic track. The analysis observes one such unit, the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. All of China's provincial-level units match students to seats using the Chinese Parallel mechanism, which is similar to deferred acceptance and takes into account students' ranked choices and their academic performance on the national college entrance examination, the gaokao (College Entrance Examination, CEE).

After learning their gaokao score and the college-major quotas and tuition fees that colleges publish for each provincial-level unit, students submit a ranked application list. An applicant may list up to 24 college-major cells, chosen from about 18,671 programs offered in a typical year across the institutions inside the centralized system. Places are then assigned by parallel-choice deferred acceptance within each admission batch.

Following the matching process, each student receives a single take-it-or-leave-it offer. A student who declines the offer, or who receives no offer, must wait until the following year to retake the gaokao; the alternatives are entering the labor market with only a high school degree or enrolling at a tertiary institution abroad. Few students go overseas after having taken the exam, since those who aim to study abroad usually do not take the gaokao and most have enrolled in foreign institutions before it is administered. Students who choose not to pursue tertiary education do not submit applications.

The application cycle is compressed into a single month. The gaokao is administered in early June. In mid-June, all Chinese colleges publish their college-major allocation quotas for each provincial-level unit together with their tuition fees. At the end of June, having learned both their own score and the published quotas and fees, students submit their ranked applications. Scores are therefore known at the moment the list is submitted, so the ranking can respond to where the student actually stands.

The matching process follows, and each student receives at most one offer, which is take-it-or-leave-it. There is no later application round within the year: a student who declines the offer or goes unmatched must wait until the following year to retake the exam.

Nationwide, 1,252 of China's 2,663 tertiary institutions admit through the centralized system, together offering about 18,671 college-major programs in a typical year. Tuition is charged among participating institutions, and financial aid is available. Because colleges set their college-major quotas separately for each provincial-level unit, the menu a Ningxia student faces is the set of quotas that colleges across the country allocate to Ningxia.

Student mobility across units runs in both directions. In 2018, 42 percent of students from Ningxia who continued to tertiary education remained in Ningxia, and 35 percent of all students attending tertiary education in Ningxia came from other parts of the country, so the choice set observed in the data reaches well beyond the region's own institutions.

The sources documented here do not record which institutions sit outside the centralized system or what share of enrollment they account for; that detail is flagged in the project's materials as awaiting the country team.

The performance measure is the gaokao total score, taken within provincial-level unit and academic track, which is the same score the admission system itself allocates on. It is constructed identically for women and men; no admission adjustment, weighting, or bonus enters it. Because results are released before applications open, students rank programs knowing their exact standing.

Performance groups are formed within setting and cohort over the full distribution of score holders. For Ningxia in 2018 the groups fill cleanly at their intended cutoffs, and the paper records no setting-specific measurement caveat for this system.

The analysis covers the 2018 admission cycle in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region: 52,427 score holders in total, the full distribution against which performance groups are defined. Women are 55.5 percent of all applicants. The top decile contains 5,203 students, 2,879 women and 2,324 men, so women are 55.3 percent of the high-achieving group; the pipeline gap runs in women's favor in this setting.

Ningxia holds about 0.5 percent of China's population and is more rural and less developed than the national average; China is one of two settings in the study observed through a subnational unit rather than nationwide, the other being Australia's state of Victoria. The country team notes, citing published evidence, that the application choices of Ningxia students remain representative of those seen in the rest of the country. Because students who choose not to pursue tertiary education do not submit applications, the sample consists of score holders in the admission system rather than the full age cohort.

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 China (Ningxia), and, as the paper's Data section notes for these systems generally, eligibility runs through academic performance alone, here the gaokao total score. The table carries the general caveat that the project has not audited every program-level entry route in every system.

The data are supplied by the Ningxia Department of Education and cover the 2018 admission cycle. The records include students' performance on the gaokao (College Entrance Examination, CEE); their ranked application choices; demographic characteristics, specifically gender and age; and parental education, which the project uses as a proxy for socioeconomic status.

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