Is it a matter of skills? The gender gap in STEM study choices in high school. Differences by parental background

Dalit Contini, Maria Laura Di Tommaso, Anna Maccagnan and Silvia Mendolia

Carlo Alberto Notebooks from Collegio Carlo Alberto

Abstract: In this paper we ask whether the gender gap in skills - favouring boys in maths and girls in language - helps to explain the large gender gap in STEM choices in high school. The existing literature shows that skills influence educational choices, but do not help to explain the gender gap. This issue has so far been addressed in the context of the field of study at university or electives at the end of high school when students' educational choices are projected onto future employment careers and may include preferences for specific occupations and considerations of work-family balance. However, the transition between lower and upper secondary school may be driven by different motivations, and skills and performance at school may be more decisive. This paper aims to fill this gap by focusing on the gendered choice of upper secondary school in Italy, where children are tracked into school types with very different learning goals at the age of 14. In such school systems, the choice of upper secondary school is crucial for children who end up not going on to university and can help to understand horizontal gender segregation in the labour market at lower levels of the social ladder. The Italian case is particularly suitable for study because it is a free choice system, with no binding teacher recommendations or ability restrictions: preferences are thus freely expressed without institutional constraints on the decision-making process. We analyse the role of school performance in mathematics and Italian (teacher grades and standardised test scores), position in class ranking and comparative advantage in a subject. We find that ability matters for educational choices, but for children with low-educated parents it hardly explains the gender gap. Instead, ability mediates part of the gender gap for children from more advantaged backgrounds. Possible explanations for this difference relate to highly educated families holding more gender-egalitarian views, or to institutional features of the education system, due to the different content of STEM studies in academic and non-academic upper secondary school types.

Keywords: Gender gap; parental education; high school choices; test scores; teacher grades; school tracking; horizontal differentiation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 61 pages
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.carloalberto.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/no.720.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

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:cca:wpaper:720

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Carlo Alberto Notebooks from Collegio Carlo Alberto Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Giovanni Bert ().