Panel study reveals ICT skills drive STEM choices across secondary and tertiary education, indicating digital competence plays a central role in mitigating gender disparities.
Gender disparities in STEM persist despite the increase in young women’s academic achievement and graduate school enrolment. We examine two explanations for this leaky pipeline. Namely, we examine whether differences in ICT skills – specifically girls’ relatively lower levels of ICT skills precluding them from STEM, and gendered preferences – where girls who are equally ICT-skilled as boys nevertheless eschew from STEM due to gender stereotype beliefs and comparative advantage in non-STEM disciplines. Using German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) data on 1,930 students’ STEM choices in secondary school and for tertiary education, we find that ICT skills are important to students’ STEM choices at both educational junctures, and that secondary school STEM choice is a key influence on STEM choice for tertiary education. Meanwhile, equally ICT-skilled students do not vary in their STEM educational choices, neither due to traditional ICT gender stereotype beliefs nor a comparative advantage in reading.
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Loh et al. (2026) studied this question.
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