Finland

The two percentage-point gaps for Finland 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.

Most tertiary education institutions in Finland participate in a centralized college admissions system: 36 of the country's 38 institutions admit through the platform. To assign students to seats, the system takes into account students' ranked preferences, their high school exit (matriculation) examination, and/or a university entrance examination. The assignment algorithm works through admission queues in a pre-specified order, allocating students to places by a deferred acceptance algorithm that is re-run over the results period.

The queue structure defines the admission routes. Before 2020, most programs admitted students through three queues: the first considered only exit exams, the second ranked individuals on a joint score of the high school exit and university admission exams, and the third admitted individuals based on the university admission exams alone. In 2020 the joint-score queue was abolished, so students are now admitted on their high school exit exams or on their university admission exams only.

Students can rank up to six college-major combinations, fewer than in earlier years, chosen from roughly 1,458 programs offered in a typical year. The online application platform also carries information on how different college-major combinations weight high school exit exams, on program-specific queues, and on any special requirements. Once an offer is made, a student decides whether to accept it and enroll in that college-major. Participating universities charge no tuition, and financial aid is available.

Applications take place twice a year, once in the fall and once in the spring, but the main application round is in the spring, and the paper focuses on the spring period because the number of programs offered in the fall round is very limited. The online application platform is open for around two weeks in March, during which students submit their ranked choices.

The timing matters for how the preference lists should be read. Finnish students submit their applications a few months before sitting their university entrance exam and before knowing their final high school GPA. The paper's institutional comparison accordingly records score knowledge at application as partial: most applicants already hold a completed matriculation certificate when they apply, but the entrance-exam component of admission is realized only after the list closes. The deferred acceptance assignment is then re-run over the results period, and once an offer is made, students decide whether to accept the offer and enroll.

Thirty-six of Finland's 38 tertiary institutions admit through the centralized platform, one of the broadest coverage rates among the ten settings the paper studies. Across these institutions, roughly 1,458 college-major combinations are offered in a typical year, and about 69.6 thousand students apply each year.

The paper's cross-setting discussion notes that where platform participation is partial, the institutions outside it are typically less selective, so the centralized platform is the route into the most selective universities and their STEM programs; Finland is not among the two settings, Brazil and Uganda, flagged as exceptions to that pattern. Which two Finnish institutions sit outside the platform, and what share of enrollment they account for, is not documented in the project's sources and awaits confirmation from the country team.

Students are ranked on matriculation (high school exit) examination grades, a university entrance examination score, or both, depending on the queue through which they compete. The administrative records include high school GPA, high school exit examination grades, and whether a student took the college entrance examination.

For the paper's analysis, performance groups are formed within setting and cohort over the full distribution of score holders, 347,904 students across the 2016-2020 cohorts. The measure is constructed identically for women and men; no admission adjustment, weighting, or bonus enters it. The top decile contains 34,585 students, 17,859 women and 16,726 men, making women 51.6 percent of the high-achieving group. That is close to parity, so the pipeline gap is small in this setting. The manuscript records no setting-specific caveat for Finland: the performance groups fill cleanly and every field is reported.

The analysis covers the 2016-2020 application cohorts. The full distribution against which performance groups are defined comprises 347,904 score holders, about 69.6 thousand applicants per year, with roughly 8.1 thousand students admitted to STEM programs per year. Women are 60.1 percent of all applicants in Finland, the highest female share among the ten settings, against 51.6 percent of the top decile.

Because the fall round offers few programs, the analysis uses the spring application round. Additional record-level exclusions, repeat-applicant rules, and field mappings are documented in the replication code.

Admission rules in Finland do not differ by sex: the paper's Table A.III comparison of the ten systems records no sex-conditional admission rule for this setting. Eligibility runs through academic performance alone, matriculation grades and entrance-exam scores, with no adjustment, quota, or bonus conditioned on the applicant's sex.

The data for Finland come from two registers maintained by the Ministry of Education, HAREK and AMKOREK, and cover the 2016-2020 application cohorts. In these records we observe the full set of applications, whether a student took the college entrance examination, high school GPA, and high school exit examination grades.

The register data are augmented with age and parental education from Statistics Finland. Access conditions and the agency contact route have not yet been supplied for publication.