The ASTI Foundation has just published its first report titled “The Persistence of the Gender Gap in STEM Education.” With it, a series of periodical publications begins that want to rigorously contribute to a better understanding of the reality and challenges associated with the development of STEM talent and the promotion of scientific and technological vocations from an eco-systemic and public collaboration vision. private.
This first report addresses from a historical perspective the evolution of the gender gap in STEM education at all educational stages at the national and international level, both at the level of the European Union and OECD countries. For this, a complete review has been carried out
bibliographical data on STEM education, often dispersed in different databases and with indicators that are difficult to compare.
The report is divided into six parts
In the first, they analyze the differences in performance based on gender in the subjects of Science and Mathematics in both Primary and Secondary Education from an international perspective.
In the second, they analyze the variables that affect this difference in performance by gender, taking as reference the results of the PISA reports in mathematical competence.
Subsequently, in the third, they analyze the expectations of students towards STEM professions based on gender at age 15 from a gender perspective.
In the fourth, fifth and sixth part they analyze the gender gap in STEM education in high school, vocational training and university respectively.
Among the main conclusions of the report, it is worth highlighting the disaffection of Spanish female students towards STEM studies that is detected at the age of fifteen. The “STEM expectations” at fifteen years of occupying a profession in this field when they reach the age of 30 in the case of Spanish students barely exceeds 1% in the case of Information and Communication Technology professions. Likewise, the percentage of girls who expect to be an engineering professional does not exceed 10%.
These low expectations correlate with the decrease in the percentage of women enrolled in university degrees such as Computer Science (with 13% of women currently compared to 27% in 1990) or Mathematics (with 36% of women compared to 51% in 1990). . In the case of Vocational Training, the percentage of women in STEM training cycles barely exceeds 12%, with families such as electricity and electronics in which women barely make up 4%.
