The Role of Cultural Contexts in Explaining Cross-National Gender Gaps in STEM Expectations

In recent decades, women have made impressive inroads in education and the labour market in most countries; yet, they often remain under-represented in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) professions. One way to understand women’s under-representation in STEM is to examine how boys and girls develop their career expectations during adolescence, as this is a critical time when individuals begin to plan their futures. Prior cross-national research finds that gender stratification in education, work, and politics in a country affects the size of male-favourable gender gaps on math and science achievement tests for adolescents. Countries with more gender equality have smaller gender gaps in math and science. But, it is unknown how gender stratification or cultural ideologies impact the development of boys’ and girls’ STEM career expectations. Do countries with less gender equality have smaller male-favourable gender gaps in STEM career expectations? Do countries with less gender egalitarian have larger male-favourable gender gaps in STEM career expectations? Using data on student's occupational expectations from the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment and data on country-level gender stratification and gender-egalitarian ideologies from the World Bank and European Values Survey, I study the gender gap in 15-year- olds' expectations to enter a STEM career across 24 countries.