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Gender equity and the gender gap in STEM: is there really a paradox?

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Abstract

This study uses an epidemiological approach to consider how culturally-inherited beliefs about appropriate gender roles may affect women’s relative representation in STEM. Prior literature has generally documented an inverse relationship between gender equity and women’s relative representation in STEM, known as the gender-equity paradox. When limiting to the sample of home countries to those considered in prior literature, I obtain robust evidence of a gender-equity paradox on both first and second-generation immigrants living in the USA. However, when I consider the full sample of home countries available, women’s relative representation in STEM no longer appears to decrease as equity increases. These results cast doubt on the existence of a gender-equity paradox between culturally-inherited beliefs about gender equality and women’s representation in STEM and have important implications for policy design.

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Notes

  1. See https://www.census.gov/newsroom/archives/2014-pr/cb14-130.html. Last accessed 1/25/2023. Similarly, I find that over this study’s sample period only 21% of those with a STEM degree worked in a STEM occupation and only 49% of those working in STEM occupations had a STEM degree.

  2. The analysis that considers the field of an immigrant’s bachelor’s degree is further limited to 2009 on due to data availability.

  3. While the gender gap in mathematics performance is distinct from the gender gap in STEM (whether measured by degree attainment or occupational attainment), in many ways, the gender gap in math is antecedent to the gap in STEM, and gender gaps in STEM tend to be large in math intensive fields (Kahn and Ginther 2017). I therefore find this literature relevant to the present work.

  4. While Richardson et al. (2020) have noted that this result is somewhat sensitive to the choice of measure of women’s representation in STEM and gender equity, Stoet and Geary (2020) show this result is robust to using the female share of STEM degrees and argue that the measure of equity used in Richardson et al. (2020) is inappropriate in this context.

  5. Both Guiso et al. (2008) and Rodríguez-Planas and Nollenberger (2018) also find that women’s reading scores tend to improve relative to boys with increases in gender equality.

  6. While Stoet and Geary (2018) argue that this pattern in test scores is likely to be driven by economic differences between gender equitable and gender inequitable countries, Rodríguez-Planas and Nollenberger (2018) have found a similar pattern of test scores among second generation immigrants, which casts doubt on this interpretation.

  7. For most countries, this is 2006 to 2007. See below for more detail.

  8. See https://usa.ipums.org/usa/sampdesc.shtml and https://usa.ipums.org/usa/chapter2/chapter2.shtml for more detail. Last accessed 3/17/2023.

  9. See https://cps.ipums.org/cps/sample_designs.shtml for more detail. Last accessed 3/17/2023.

  10. See http://data.uis.unesco.org/. Last accessed 1/27/2022.

  11. Taking 18 and 22 years old to be the age at which individuals begin and graduate from college respectively, approximately a third (33.1%) of the final sample of first generation immigrants would have immigrated before beginning college and nearly half (47.5%) would have immigrated to the USA before completing college. Thus, a sizable share of first-generation immigrants on the final sample are likely to have earned their degree within the USA.

  12. I also note that I show that I find similar results when using field of study and occupation on first-generation immigrants.

  13. The complete list may be accessed here: https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/guidance/industry-occupation/stem-census-2010-occ-code-list.xls. Last accessed 1/5/2021.

  14. See the second footnote in the above attachment.

  15. This approach also follows Kahn and Ginther (2017) who argue that the overall gender gap in STEM is small, and it is mainly observed only in more mathematically intensive GEMP fields. Furthermore, both Stoet and Geary (2018) and Breda et al. (2020) heavily cite mathematics performance and gendered beliefs about math as the primarily causal mechanisms behind the gender-equity paradox. Therefore, one would expect changes in STEM to be primarily driven by changes in these occupations and fields of study.

  16. Economics is not reported separately from other social sciences as a field of study and is therefore also excluded here.

  17. Countries for which the equity index is available in 2007 but not 2006 are Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belize, Cuba, the Maldives, Mozambique, Oman, Qatar, Suriname, Syria, Tajikistan, and Vietnam.

  18. Thus, the 2008 value was used for Barbados and Brunei; 2009 for the Bahamas, Fiji, Senagal, and Guyana; 2010 for the Ivory Coast and Lebanon; 2011 for Burundi; 2012 for Cabo Verde, Serbia, and Timor Leste; 2013 for Bhutan and Laos; and 2014 for Guinea, Liberia, Montenegro, Rwanda, and Swaziland.

  19. These are Angola, Bahrain, Benin, Botswana, Brunei, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Chad, Lesotho, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Malawi, the Maldives, Mali, Malta, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Oman, Qatar, Slovenia, Suriname, Swaziland, Tajikistan, and Timor-Leste.

  20. These are Luxembourg, Qatar, and Slovenia.

  21. The sample of second-generation immigrants additionally excludes Tunisia, which leads to 90 and 92% coverage of the countries in Stoet and Geary (2018) and Breda et al. (2020) respectively.

  22. This leads to 51.2 and 58.6% of the observations in the final sample being included in the restricted samples meant to replicate Stoet and Geary (2018) and Breda et al.’s (Breda et al. (2020)) samples respectively.

  23. Ideally, this column would be restricted to 3rd+ generation only; however, as the ACS does not record nativity to the second generation, second-generation immigrants cannot be dropped from the calculations.

  24. The estimates using STEM and GEMP degrees differ somewhat more, by 0.7 percentage points, which is approximately 16% of the mean for first-generation female immigrants, though this differences is still fairly small.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Editor Milena Nikolova and her three anonymous referees for their helpful comments in crafting this work. In addition, I would like to thank the participants at the 2021 Southern Economic Association’s Annual Conference in Houston, Texas. I also owe a debt of gratitude to my dissertation committee members Kaj Gittings, Rashid Al-Hmoud, and Sie Won Kim for their advice and guidance through the early stages of this work.

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  1. Department of Accounting, Economics, and Finance, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Little Rock, AR, USA

    William Jergins

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Jergins, W. Gender equity and the gender gap in STEM: is there really a paradox?. J Popul Econ 36, 3029–3056 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-023-00959-9

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