Short Communication · online materials
The Global Gender Gap in STEM Applications: Pipeline vs. Choice
This study separates gender differences in academic preparation from gender differences in application decisions using administrative microdata from ten centralized university admission systems.
10
Centralized admission systems: Australia, Brazil, Chile, China, Finland, Greece, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Uganda.
23.7 percentage points
How much less likely a top-10% woman is than a top-10% man to rank a STEM program first, averaging across the ten settings.
57%–75% male
What the high-achieving STEM applicant pool would still be if the pipeline gap were closed entirely, in every setting.
Pipeline and choice gaps across settings
The pipeline gap is who reaches the top of the academic distribution. It varies markedly across settings and in sign, from female disadvantage in Uganda to female advantage in Sweden, and is positively associated with labor-market gender parity. The choice gap compares women and men who have already cleared the same bar. It is negative in every setting under both “STEM first” and “STEM anywhere on the list” definitions. The pooled first-choice gap changes by less than one percentage point as the high-achieving group widens from the top 5% to the top 30%. The choice gap exceeds 20 percentage points in eight of the ten systems.
Pipeline gap and choice gap, ten settings, shared percentage-point axis
Both quantities are female-minus-male differences in percentage points, plotted on the same scale so their dispersion can be compared directly.
The zero line is drawn because the sign is the point: the choice gap sits below it everywhere, while the pipeline gap crosses it. Countries are sorted by pipeline gap, from female disadvantage on the left to female advantage on the right.
Expected columns for public/data/hero_two_gaps.csv: country, pipeline_gap_pp, choice_gap_pp. Until the file is supplied nothing is plotted — no illustrative or approximate series is drawn in its place.
Why ranked applications are informative
All ten systems rank students on academic performance and assign places through variants of deferred acceptance. Under that class of mechanism, ranking programs in true preference order gives applicants little incentive to misreport. The submitted list is therefore informative about the ordering of programs an applicant was willing to enter. It is not interpreted as a preference parameter: list limits, score timing, and information held before application remain relevant to interpretation.
Online materials
- The two gapsThe log-odds identity, why deferred acceptance makes a submitted list informative, and what the design does not establish.
- The ten systemsA sortable comparison plus a full page per system: rules, calendar, institutions, performance measure, sample, and provenance.
- MechanismsFour families of explanation, what each predicts, and what evidence would be needed to separate them. The data here cannot.
- Results explorerThresholds from the top 1% to the top 30%, two outcome definitions, three field groups, levels or gaps.
- Figures & dataEvery figure with its note, its underlying counts, and a download — including the ones the paper defers here.
- Paper & citationAbstract, PDF, BibTeX, the thirteen authors, replication materials, and plain data-access conditions.