EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Assessing the effects of gender stereotype in STEM in a Brazilian university

Camila Alvarenga and Cicero Braga

EconomiA, 2024, vol. 25, issue 1, 74-91

Abstract: Purpose - In Brazil, over 4.7 million women enrolled in university in the year 2017. However, Brazilian women have been consistently overrepresented in humanities and care majors and underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Given that observed gender differences in math-intensive fields have lasting effects on gender inequality in the labor market, and that observed gender variations do not necessarily associate with differences in innate ability, in this paper we explore the paths of societal gender bias and gender differences in a Brazilian university. Design/methodology/approach - We conduct a social experiment at a University in Southeastern Brazil, applying the gender-STEM Implicit Association Test. Findings - We found that women in STEM are less likely to show gender-STEM implicit stereotypes, compared to women in humanities. The results indicate a negative correlation between implicit gender stereotyping and the choice of math-intensive majors by women. Originality/value - The stereotype-congruent results are indicative of the gender bias in Brazilian society, and suggest that stereotypes created at early stages in life are directly related to future outcomes that reinforce gender disparities in Brazil, which can be observed in career choices.

Keywords: Gender gap; Gender bias; Experiment; STEM; University; Tertiary education; J16; C93; A23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (text/html)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eme:econpp:econ-05-2022-0025

DOI: 10.1108/ECON-05-2022-0025

Access Statistics for this article

EconomiA is currently edited by Professor Joaquim Andrade

More articles in EconomiA from Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Emerald Support ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eme:econpp:econ-05-2022-0025