Spain

The two percentage-point gaps for Spain 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.

Spain operates a dual admission system split by sector. Private universities admit students through a fully decentralized process, while public universities select their students through a centralized deferred acceptance system based on a weighted average of high school GPA and a college entrance exam, the EBAU. The centralized channel carries most of the system's weight: 83 percent of students enroll in a public university program.

Students apply to college-major combinations, submitting a rank-ordered preference list through an online platform. An applicant may list up to 12 programs, chosen from roughly 2,169 programs offered in a typical year across the 50 institutions inside the centralized system. Colleges publish the list of majors and the vacancies offered for the coming academic year before the application window opens, so the menu of options is known in advance. The paper's system-comparison table records the assignment mechanism as score-ordered regional assignment: within the public system, seats are allocated in order of the admission score, with the process organized at the regional level.

Because the mechanism is a variant of deferred acceptance, the submitted list can be read as an ordering over the programs a student was willing to enter. As the paper's Data section notes, this shared DA structure across the ten settings gives students little incentive to misreport their preferences, which is what allows the application list to serve as the object of study.

The cycle compresses into a single summer. Students take the entrance exam at the beginning of June, which coincides with the end of the Spanish academic year. Before applications start, colleges publish the majors and vacancies they will offer for the next academic year. The application platform is open between mid-June and the beginning of July, so students submit their ranked lists already knowing their exam results.

The results of the first round of admissions are published in mid-July. A student can accept the initial offer and pre-register, or reject it. Rejection carries real risk: a student who turns down the first-round offer can end with no offer at all, or with an offer for an option far down the priority list. The reason is a waiting-list rule. If a student rejects the offer and applies to a different program that is oversubscribed, she is placed on the waiting list even if her score is higher than that of students currently admitted, because she modified her order of preference after the deadline of the first applications.

Fifty of Spain's 86 universities admit through the centralized system. The dividing line is sector: public universities allocate their seats through the centralized deferred acceptance mechanism, while private universities run fully decentralized admissions and sit outside the platform. Because 83 percent of students enroll in a public university program, the centralized system covers the large majority of enrollment.

This participation pattern matters for reading the results in the way the paper's Data section describes: in eight of the ten settings, Spain among them, the centralized platform is the route into the most selective universities and their STEM programs, and where participation is partial the institutions outside the platform are typically less selective. Among participating universities, tuition is charged and financial aid is available.

The admission score is a weighted average of performance in high school and on the entrance exam: the two-year high school GPA counts for 60 percent of the total and the EBAU entrance exam for 40 percent. Students can gain extra points by taking elective subjects in the entrance exam, and the paper's at-a-glance table records the measure as Bachillerato GPA and EBAU, weighted by program. The final score ranges between 0 and 14 points, with the threshold for passing set at 5 points.

Spain is a setting where students know where they stand before they choose. The exam is taken at the beginning of June, the application platform is open between mid-June and the beginning of July, and the paper's system comparison records the score as known when the list is submitted, so the ranked list can respond to the student's actual position in the distribution.

For the paper's analysis, performance groups are formed within setting and cohort over the full distribution of score holders. The measure is constructed identically for women and men; no admission adjustment, weighting, or bonus enters it. In Spain the groups fill cleanly, and the manuscript records no tie-related or other setting-specific caveat for this system.

The analysis draws on the 2020-2024 admission cohorts and covers students who take the EBAU to access university, 81 percent of an average cohort. The paper's Data section cites this figure when noting that the systems differ in how much of the wider cohort they capture, contrasting Spain's 81 percent with Uganda's smaller and more selected pool. The 19 percent of first-year students who enter university without the standardized entrance exam divide into two groups: 53 percent come from the vocational track of tertiary education, and the other 47 percent already completed a university degree, come from foreign universities, or took special exams designed for students older than 25, 40, and 45.

Across the five cohorts the data contain 857,870 score holders, the full distribution against which performance groups are defined. The top decile contains 85,691 students, of whom 53,783 are women and 31,908 are men, making women 62.8 percent of the high-achieving group against 56.8 percent of all applicants; the pipeline gap runs in women's favor in this setting. The system processes roughly 171.6 thousand applicants per year, and about 32.6 thousand students are admitted to a STEM program each year.

Additional record-level exclusions, repeat-applicant rules, and field mappings are documented in the replication code.

Admission rules in Spain 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, and the appendix's setting-specific notes raise none. As the Data section states for these systems, eligibility runs through academic performance alone; in Spain the score that governs admission is the weighted average of high school GPA and the EBAU, and the performance measure used in the analysis is constructed identically for women and men.

Our data for Spain come from the Spanish Ministry of Universities and cover the 2020-2024 admission cohorts: students who take the EBAU to access university, 81 percent of an average cohort. For each student the records contain the GPA in high school, the score in the EBAU, and the ranked list of preferences, along with the student's age and gender.

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