Secondary school subjects and gendered STEM enrollment in higher education in Germany, Ireland, and Scotland

Abstract

This article examines the extent to which science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subject choice in upper secondary education explains gender differences in STEM enrollment in higher education. We adopt a cross-country approach using Germany, Ireland, and Scotland as three case studies. These countries differ in terms of both the degree of subject choice offered in upper secondary education and the relevance for higher education admission of having studied specific school subjects. Using datasets of young people from all three countries, our results indicate a stronger mediation of school subjects for Scotland than in Germany and Ireland and a remarkable gender gap in STEM enrollment in all three countries. We conclude that females studying science subjects within upper secondary education appears to be a necessary but not a sufficient condition to ensure gender equality in progression to STEM fields.

Participation in science in secondary and higher education in Scotland in the second half of the twentieth century

“…This conclusion about the importance of reforms to the secondary-school curriculum in changing the social distribution of scientific study is similar to that by, for example, Ayalon and Livneh (2013), Charles and Bradley (2002) and Jacob et al (2020), but has been reached, not by comparative research as in these authors' work, but by following a single country over a long period of time The present research thus adds a new chronological dimension to these authors' conclusions.…”

“…Sex and socio-economic differences in entry to pure science at higher education were a product of the analogous differences at school (a finding similar to that of Jacob et al 2020). Female participation rose faster than male, because female participation in science at school also rose faster.…”

“…The most telling version of the equality-of-opportunity case has been in relation to sex (for example, Jacob et al 2020;Nunes et al 2017, 7;Moote et al 2019, 8-9). One argument has again been economic: women's skills were being lost to science (Roberts 2002, 47), and female students may have been deterred from taking scientific courses by a perception that female opportunities to purse scientific careers were restricted (Moorhouse 2017).…”

“…Following the introduction of Standard Grade, a mandatory curriculum framework was set in place in the 1990s, making science compulsory in public-sector schools, which educated 95% of pupils (Croxford 1997). This reform might be interpreted as following the belief that the most effective way of changing the social distribution of scientific opportunities would be by changing the structure of the curriculum, not by, for example, campaigns merely to encourage more girls to take science (Jacob et al 2020). Scotland thus followed an international tendency in curricular reform whereby an attachment to universalistic principles weakened the socially invidious patterns of subject choice that had been common (Ayalon and Livneh 2013;Charles and Bradley 2002).…”

Adolescent school injuries and classroom sex compositions in German secondary schools

“…Consequently, our results constitute a baseline for a combined measure of sex compositions in close and distant peers at school. Finally, we cannot fully avoid problems of unobserved heterogeneity between schools and classes from differential preferences of boys and girls with respect to STEM or liberal arts (99). However, we are able to attenuate this problem by adjusting for time-invariant unobserved characteristics of school classes by including random intercepts at the class-level.…”