Educational Preparedness: Prior Achievement, Comparative Advantage and Course-taking

• Author: McNally, Sandra
• Pages: 18-20

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Although a similar pattern can be found across countries, there i s s till some

variation and gender gaps have evolved over time. Women’s representation in each

STEM field increased rapidly during the 1970s (Ginther and Kahn, 2016), and continued

to grow in psychology and life sciences in the 1980s and 1990s before it stabilised (both

ending above 70 per cent). In more recent decades trends have been much more stable

across several STEM fields. This is shown for the US by the National Science Foundation

reports (1997-2016)9 with respect to physical sciences, biological sciences, maths and

statistics, and physics. The statistics also show that the share of women with degrees

awarded in computer science declined from 27 per cent in 1997 to 17 per cent in 2016.

Reasons for the pattern of this evolution in specific STEM fields are not well understood.

Cheryan et al. (2017) document within-field gender gaps. For example, in

engineering, women are more likely to be represented in chemical, biomedi cal and

architectural engineering than in electrical, mechanical and nuclear engineering. In

computer science, women are more hi ghly represented in human-computer interaction

than in robotics. Within surgical sub-specialties, women comprise 36 per cent of general

surgery residents and fellows but only 13 per cent of orthopaedic surgery residents and

fellows. There is little research about why particul ar sub-fields are more popular with

women than others and this is clearly an important area for future resea rch.10

3. Educational Preparedness: Prior Achievement,

Comparative Advantage and Course-taking

As students need prerequisites to enter STEM programmes, the gender gap may

result not only from choices made at the point of entry into tertiary education but al so

investment decisions made before – by young people, their families and educators. This

is reflected in their ‘educational preparedness’, which we broadly define h ere to mean

the following: (a) general educational achievement across a range of subjects – relevant

because STEM programmes at tertiary level will be demanding academically; (b)

achievement in mathematical subjects - an important prerequisite for many STEM

programmes; (c) comp arative advantage in subjects requiring mathematical versus

literacy profici ency. This is relevant because a person’s choices may be in fluenced by

his/her relative strengths in proficiencies that are used to different intensities in tertiary-

level studies; and (d) course-taking in upper secondary education which is itself

influenced by (a), (b) and (c). These fact ors are themselves influenced by many other

factors at the individual and societal level that are also relevant even among those who

are STEM ready at the point at which they enter tertiary edu cation. These will be

discussed in subsequent sections.

Figure 4 shows the difference in PISA scores between 15-year-old girls and boys

(i.e. the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment). In all countries,

there is a substantial gap (favouring girls) in reading. For science and maths, the gender

gap i s much smaller. Where there is a difference, i t usually favours boys in maths –

although not for all countries. For science, the picture is more mixed – sometimes

favouring boys and sometimes favouring girls. Both Fryer and Levitt (2010) and Hyde

and Mertz (2009) find that the gender gap in maths is not evident at the beginning of

schooling but emerges over ti me. The substantial difference in reading favouring girls

shows that, on average, girls’ comparative a dvantage i s in reading whereas for the

9 https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf19304/digest/field-of-degree-women

10 Cheryan et al. (2017) hypothesise that factors which come out strongly in their literature review might have

a role to play in explaining such disparities: namely, insufficient early experience, perceptions of a masculine

culture and gender gaps in self-efficacy. These explanations are covered in later sections.