Uganda

The two percentage-point gaps for Uganda 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.

Students in Uganda can be admitted to public universities through two schemes: the national merit scholarship, which covers both tuition and living expenses, and the self-funding scheme, in which students pay for both. The national scholarship scheme is centralized; the self-funding scheme, like admission to private universities, is decentralized. According to the National Commission on Higher Education, more than half of university enrollments are in public universities. The centralized track studied in the paper is government-sponsored admission administered by the Public University Joint Admissions Board (PUJAB). This track is narrow relative to the sector: government-sponsored places amount to roughly a tenth of undergraduate seats at Makerere, the largest public university, with the remainder filled through privately sponsored admissions that each university runs itself.

Admission under either scheme is based on test scores in the national examinations, which resemble subject-based SATs in the United States; the official metric is the 'weighted score', which is program-specific. Applicants to the centralized scheme submit a preference list ranking up to six majors in order of preference, and places are assigned by merit-order selection. Applications are submitted before test scores are known. Additional admission schemes exist — district quota, disabled quota, sports, international students, mature age, and diploma or degree holders — but these also depend on national-examination performance, make up a very small portion of total admissions, and are mostly self-funded, except for the district and disabled quotas.

A distinctive feature of the Ugandan system is an early and hard track gate. At the end of upper secondary school students take A-level examinations in three subjects, known locally as the 'subject combination', which varies by student — one might take biology, chemistry, and mathematics, another physics, economics, and mathematics. A student whose subject combination is non-STEM cannot apply to STEM majors at university at all, while the reverse is possible: a student with a STEM combination can apply to both STEM and non-STEM programs. Before selecting the A-level combination, students take national examinations in at least eight subjects at the end of O-level, and these results can qualify them for specific combinations. As the paper's Data section puts it, part of what is measured as choice in Uganda is a track decision taken years before the application — one that forecloses the STEM option rather than merely discouraging it. Uganda nonetheless has the smallest choice gap in the paper's data, so this restriction is not generating the pattern the paper reports.

Students apply to the centralized scheme before knowing their test scores, typically between December and January, and some apply even before sitting their national examinations in early December. Offers are usually announced around March or April. Because the ranked list is submitted before results are released, it reflects expected rather than realized performance, and admission-risk considerations enter through applicants' beliefs about their own scores.

The sources record the examination window, the application window, and the offer announcement, but not the date on which examination results are released to students or whether there are multiple offer rounds; that finer detail would need to come from the country team.

Eight of Uganda's 52 tertiary institutions admit through the centralized PUJAB platform, offering about 149 programs in a typical year. Tuition is charged among participating universities, and financial aid is available. Public universities account for more than half of university enrollments nationwide.

Coverage within the participating universities is partial as well as across them: the platform allocates only government-sponsored places — roughly a tenth of undergraduate seats at Makerere, the largest public university — while the remaining seats are filled through privately sponsored admissions run by each university, and admission to private universities is likewise decentralized. The Ugandan sample therefore covers the government-sponsored track rather than the selective sector as a whole. Five public universities are named in the sources in connection with admission rules: Makerere, Mbarara, Gulu, Busitema, and Soroti.

Which 44 institutions sit outside the platform, and what share of enrollment they account for, is not documented in the project's sources; completing that list would need the country team.

The performance measure used in the paper is not the official admission score. Ugandan applicants are ranked on an index the research team constructs from raw national-examination grades — in the country team's description, the integer sum of the mathematics and English grades in the national examinations — and this index is identical in construction for women and men and carries no adjustment. Applicants are ranked on it within the PUJAB applicant sample to form deciles and top groups, as in the other settings. The official PUJAB weighted score is not used: it is program-specific and carries the 1.5-point adjustment for female applicants described in the sex-rules section.

The measure is unusually coarse. The index takes only seventeen distinct values, so cell sizes are uneven and ties at each value mean the performance groups cannot be filled exactly: the top decile covers 8.8 percent of the cohort and the top 20 percent covers 14.7 percent, against 10 and 20 percent elsewhere. A true top-1-percent cutoff cannot be identified on a seventeen-value score, so where the paper reports that group for Uganda it is the top score group — 547 students, or 1.5 percent of applicants. This is immaterial for the estimates: interpolating between adjacent thresholds moves Uganda's gaps by under 0.03 log points.

The analysis sample is drawn from applicants to the centralized PUJAB platform, that is, the government-sponsored track into public universities. The data cover the 2021–2022 cohorts — the 2021/2022 admissions cycle in the country team's description — making Uganda the most recent setting in the paper, whose cohorts otherwise reach back to 2003–2012 in Greece. The sample contains 36,247 score holders in total, against roughly 18.1 thousand applicants per year. Women are 43.9 percent of applicants, making Uganda one of only two settings, with Taiwan, where women are a minority of the applicant pool. The paper's Data section also notes that Uganda's applicant pool is smaller and more selected than in settings such as Spain, where 81 percent of a cohort sits the entrance examination.

Performance groups are formed within setting and cohort over the full distribution of score holders. The top decile contains 3,187 students — 1,231 women and 1,956 men, so women are 38.6 percent of the high-achieving group and the pipeline gap runs against women in this setting. Because of the seventeen-value score, the 'top decile' in fact covers 8.8 percent of the cohort, as described in the performance section.

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

Admission rules in Uganda are the most explicitly sex-conditional in the paper's sample, and they favor women. Female applicants have received an additional 1.5 points on the official weighted score since 1990. Makerere University, the largest public university, admits students to STEM programs on a 40:60 female-to-male ratio from the 2020 academic year, and Mbarara, Gulu, Busitema and Soroti apply 30:70 ratios for the underrepresented sex; the published admissions guide correspondingly lists separate male and female cutoff points for STEM programs, while non-STEM programs carry a single cutoff.

None of this enters the performance measure used in the paper. Ugandan applicants are ranked on an index the research team constructs from raw national-examination grades, which is identical in construction for women and men and carries no adjustment; the official PUJAB weighted score, which does carry the adjustment, is program-specific and is not used. Because applications are submitted before results are released, these rules can reach the choice gap only through anticipation, and anticipating an advantage would if anything push Uganda's gap toward zero — which is where Uganda sits, with the smallest choice component in the paper's sample.

The records come from the Public University Joint Admissions Board (PUJAB), the agency that administers government-sponsored admissions to Uganda's public universities, and cover applicants to the centralized platform in the 2021/2022 admissions cycle. The dataset includes each student's preference list, which may rank up to six majors in order of preference, their test scores in the A-level subject combinations, and their scores in the O-level national examinations, along with each applicant's age, gender, high school, and district of origin.

Access conditions and the agency contact route have not yet been supplied for publication.