The inequality suffered by women has very deep roots. A study published this Tuesday by EsadeEcPol proposes a novel analysis that takes mathematics as its axis. The research, like a journey, begins in primary education, with the detachment that a good part of the girls, in a proportion clearly higher than that of their classmates, begin to express discomfort towards the subject. It continues through basic education, a stage in which this feeling deepens and crystallizes in the choice of post-compulsory training branches that very largely avoid both the subject and its derivatives, which the report encompasses in the Anglo-Saxon acronym STEM: science, technology, engineering and mathematics. And it leads to the labor market, where women have a very low representation in the group of jobs linked to these disciplines, barely one in four, despite the fact that the salary gap with respect to men and other factors that hinder their professional careers, such as unwanted short hours, are significantly lower in that sector.
The report, titled Women in STEM. From basic education to career, prepared by Lucía Cobreros, Jorge Galindo and Teresa Raigada, cites more than 70 investigations on the subject published in recent years and also presents its own indicators to show the dimensions of the problem. Boys and girls from primary school show a different performance in mathematics in favor of the first in international assessments, both in Spain and in the OECD average (in reading it is girls who have an advantage over their classmates , to an even greater extent). The authors state that this difference has been explained by researchers over time through two main theories: one that attributes it to biological differences, and one that attributes it to sociocultural differences. The Esade study takes the second position that has, it assures, greater “scientific support.” And, in addition to analyzing the data, it proposes changes in teacher training, the contents and the way of explaining them to counteract the gender stereotypes to which female students are exposed from a young age, both at home and at school, where some of the teachers have “biases” that lead them to “associate masculine characteristics with the sciences and feminine ones with areas such as the humanities.”
Up to the age of five, there is no difference in the “expectations of brilliance†between girls and boys, according to studies carried out in different countries. At six, however, coinciding with the first year of primary education, “both boys and girls categorize boys as “really intelligent” people, and begin to express ” œboth implicitly and explicitly that mathematics is “a boy's thing.” In the international TIMSS assessment, which evaluates 10-year-old students, Spanish girls obtain 14.6 points less than boys, making it the third EU country with the greatest difference ( behind Cyprus and Portugal). Living in more egalitarian countries seems to contribute to reducing the gap, while living in countries where gender roles are very marked widens them, according to the available evidence. While another study suggests that studying in classes with a higher percentage of female students could improve their performance in STEM disciplines. This work, published in 2023, used data from Greece, where secondary school students are randomly assigned to classrooms, which can lead to significant gender disproportions.
Girls experience more anxiety when it comes to mathematics – one study detects this as early as age seven. And only in them, furthermore, these nerves are related to a drop in performance in the subject. At 16 years old, Spanish girls obtain 10.1 points less in mathematics in the PISA report exams (in reading, female students are 25.3 points ahead of their peers). The difference, which is in line with the European Union average, has been reduced by 6.4 points between 2012 and 2022. But the discomfort that the subject generates in adolescents has skyrocketed in the same period; The percentage of girls who say they get nervous when solving mathematical problems has gone from 11% to 21.3%.
Five pieces of research published since 2018 support the common impression that what girls and boys say they want to be when they grow up ends up having an influence on what they end up being. Which makes it more important to counteract the gender stereotypes that have surrounded them since they were little. Girls tend to be more supportive of community values and less of individual ones, and express a “relatively higher preference” toward professional “family over career.” And adolescent girls with a “traditional view of femininity” and “work roles” are less likely to pursue “careers related to physical sciences, mathematics, engineering and technology in adulthood” as adults, according to an investigation that followed the same people in the United States for years.
At 15 years old, only 1.3% of 15-year-old Spanish adolescent girls want to dedicate themselves to information technologies (compared to 10.3% of boys), and 9.8% to engineering, physics, chemistry, mathematics or biology (compared to 17.5% of students), according to the PISA report. 21.9% of female students want to dedicate themselves to health-related jobs (compared to 8.7% of boys). This is materialized in the Baccalaureate, where in 2021 they represented 76% in the arts branch, 64% in humanities, 54% in social sciences, and 48% in sciences. In Selectivity, female students take less than half the exams than their classmates in Physics and Technical Drawing.
One of the elements that, according to the authors of the Esade report, contributes to girls moving further away from mathematics and the rest of the disciplines associated with it than boys would be the different tendency to compete. Two pieces of research cited in the report point out “that students with a greater propensity for competition, regardless of grades, have a greater probability of choosing a specialization in mathematics, with boys being more likely to compete.” . When mathematics ability is not measured at a specific moment, for example in a single exam, but in all the work done throughout the course, performance differences are blurred or girls even obtain better results. Hence one of the works concludes that “certain results of mathematics exams could be exaggerating the advantage of men over women.”
The most radical educational segregation in Spain occurs in vocational training, where only 7% of female students graduate with STEM degrees, compared to 52% of male students. At the university, women represent 14% in computer science, 27% in science, 37% in mathematics and statistics, 73% in health and social services, and 78% in education. . Despite this, the dropout rate in the first year, one of the indicators of university performance, is lower among them in STEM careers – 8% compared to 13% in engineering, for example –.
Research cited in the Esade study suggests that women have a “greater susceptibility to signals of not belonging,” which would lead them to avoid highly masculinized environments. Among the measures that seem to have a positive result when it comes to encouraging female students to opt for STEM activities is putting them in contact with women who work in them, so that they can explain it to them first-hand. “The results,†the Esade researchers add, pointing in a similar direction, “suggest that the most effective interventions were those that tried to improve the perception of STEM careers without excessively emphasizing the underrepresentation of women†.
All of the above means that only 5.5% of women occupy STEM jobs, compared to 13% of men, although the gap is smaller among the younger population (in the age group). 16 to 29 years old the percentages are 9% and 17% respectively). And it happens despite the fact that women who work in this type of job have better salaries than those who do it in others, and, although they also earn less than their male colleagues, said gap is somewhat smaller (the salary of men is 10% higher than that of women in the case of professionals and 8% in the case of technicians, below the average for occupations, which is 20%). The proportion of female workers with partial contracts is, in STEM jobs, 7.6%, when in other occupations it reaches 26.9%.
The educational trajectories exposed lead to a work reality in which only 5.5% of women occupy STEM jobs (13% of men). The Esade report, which uses its own indicator based on the exploitation of microdata from the INE Living Conditions Survey, reflects a general positive change. Only 3.7% of women between 45 and 64 years old have a job in the sector, but the percentage increases to 7%, between 30 and 44, and to 9.1% between 16 and 29. In the first of these bands, the proportion of men in STEM positions triples that of women, while in the youngest age cohort this factor is reduced to 1.84.
The authors of the Esade study propose a series of measures to address the situation. Among them: improve the pedagogical training of teachers, and generalize a gender approach when explaining mathematics and other STEM subjects; include female references in teaching materials and bring real women who work in the sector to the classrooms (or students to their jobs), and create more inclusive work environments. The lack of a welcoming culture and the persistence of gender stereotypes in companies appear, along with the difficulties to reconcile, according to several investigations cited in the report, as the main reasons for the “low preference†of women to when choosing scientific-technical occupations.
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