Poorer countries lead the way in getting women into tech
Women more likely to study Stem subjects in countries with less gender equality
Developing countries are outperforming their richer advanced peers when it comes to encouraging women to study the so-called Stem subjects of science, technology, engineering and maths.
Women typically account for between 20 per cent and 30 per cent of Stem graduates in advanced countries, even though they are far more likely than men to attend university, leading to claims that discrimination or gender norms are discouraging women from studying such subjects.
However, the data show women are more likely to study Stem subjects in poorer countries generally viewed as less gender equal, particularly in the Middle East, north Africa and south-east Asia.
“The more gender unequal countries are, the higher the proportion of women going into these Stem subjects. That shows the discrimination hypothesis is probably not the best explanation for why we see so few women engineers and computer analysts,” said Professor Gijsbert Stoet, of the School of Social Sciences at Leeds Beckett University, and co-author of the paper The Gender-Equality Paradox in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Education.
Among the 52 countries analysed in the study, Algeria had the highest proportion of women among its Stem graduates, at 40.7 per cent. It was closely followed by a raft of other Muslim-majority Mediterranean and Middle East states such as Tunisia, Albania, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey. South-east Asian states such as Vietnam and Indonesia are not far behind, as the chart shows.
Yet all of these countries score poorly in the World Economic Forum’s annual Global Gender Gap Report, which purports to measure gaps in areas such as education, health, economic opportunity and political empowerment. (The WEF index is, in reality, deeply flawed as a measure of gender equality, but does serve as a gauge of female empowerment or primacy, so it does work for the purposes of this analysis.)
In contrast, Scandinavian countries such as Finland and Norway, which have very high scores for gender equality in the WEF’s rankings, have extremely low shares of female Stem graduates, at 20 per cent and 20.3 per cent respectively, with equally lauded Sweden, at 23.4 per cent, not too dissimilar.
This broad pattern runs through the data with, for instance, emerging eastern European countries, such as Macedonia, Georgia and Romania, tending to have a higher proportion of female Stem graduates than southern European ones such as Italy, Portugal and Greece, which themselves are ahead of western European countries such as Germany, France, Switzerland and the Benelux states, generally viewed as more female-friendly.
A similar pattern was evident in terms of the relative academic strengths and weaknesses of girls and boys in different countries, based on widely used Programme for International Student Assessment, or Pisa, tests in 67 countries.
Globally, boys and girls have similar abilities in science literacy in most countries. However, in 97 per cent of nations, science was more likely to be a personal academic strength of boys than of girls.
In every country in the sample, reading was more likely to be a personal strength of girls, while maths was more likely to be an intra-individual strength for boys in every nation.
Significantly, though, Prof Stoet and co-author David Geary, based in the Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Missouri, found that the sex differences in intra-individual strength in science were higher and more favourable to boys in more gender-equal countries, as were the sex differences in intra-individual strength in reading in favour of girls.
So, in a country such as Finland, even though girls outperformed boys in science, they performed even better in reading, giving them more options than boys typically had.
“The intra-individual sex differences in relative strengths in science and reading rose with increases in gender equality. In accordance with expected-value theory, this pattern should result in far more boys than girls pursuing a Stem career in more gender-equal nations, and this was the case,” the paper said.
The academics’ explanation for their seemingly counterintuitive findings is that countries perceived as having high gender equality typically tend to be welfare states, with high levels of social security.
This means there is a smaller financial cost to foregoing a Stem career, a path that can often lead to a reasonably high-paying job. Individuals have relative freedom to pursue careers in areas that interest them and they excel at.
Less gender-equal countries tend to have more difficult living conditions, meaning the utility value of a degree in a Stem subject is typically higher, in relative terms. Harsher economic conditions may force people to take whatever jobs are available, irrespective of whether they match their personal interests or not.
In a poorer country, a Stem degree “may help you to pay the schools for your children or pay your medical bills. These are not problems many people in north-west Europe have,” Prof Stoet said.
“I wish more girls would go into [Stem subjects]. There are all sorts of benefits, but the fact is wherever you give girls the choice, they make very different choices based on their interests.”
Steve Stewart-Williams, an associate professor in the School of Psychology at the University of Nottingham’s Malaysia campus, agreed with this interpretation of the data.
“In my view, the most plausible explanation is that when people have more economic security and freedom, they have more scope to act on their personal preferences and to nurture their own individuality. As a result, average differences between the sexes are magnified, including sex differences in occupational outcomes,” said Mr Stewart-Williams, although he conceded “the jury’s still out”, given a lack of conclusive evidence at this stage.
He did not believe that the countries in the Middle East and north Africa with the highest proportion of female Stem graduates were doing something right that should be copied elsewhere.
“People sometimes argue that, because these countries have more women in Stem, they must be doing something right that we’re not. I think this is probably a mistake,” he said.
“It’s based on the unspoken assumption that sex differences are necessarily a bad thing and a symptom of a sexist society. But there’s now a lot of research suggesting that sex differences tend to be larger, rather than smaller, in more gender-equal nations. So, rather than being a symptom of a sexist society, sex differences may sometimes be a symptom of the opposite: a society which is making slow but steady progress toward genuine gender equality.”
Mr Stewart-Williams believed developed countries should continue to encourage women to pursue a Stem career, such as by highlighting the scientific achievements of both sexes, rather than just men, adopting gender-blind approaches to job applications and research grants and trying to make scientific careers compatible with motherhood.
He was, though, opposed to “affirmative action” policies that discriminate against men and 50:50 sex targets, arguing countries should aim for equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome.
Cordelia Fine, professor of the history and philosophy of science at the University of Melbourne and author of Testosterone Rex, said she was not surprised by the findings, which she ascribed to a “legacy of cultural beliefs about innate differences between the sexes, and their influence on goals, expectations and experiences, particularly in combination with the economic freedom for self-expression in more wealthy countries”.
“In other words, we have greater freedom to express culturally gendered selves” in wealthier nations, said Prof Fine, who added that some research had pointed to “greater endorsement of gender stereotypes in developed countries scoring more favourably on gender equality measures”.
She accepted the conclusions drawn by Prof Stoet and Mr Geary may be correct but added that what this explanation misses is that “something appears to be going on in more gender-equal countries that reduces girls’ interest, joy and self-confidence when it comes to science”.
Ana Maria Munoz-Boudet, a senior social scientist at the World Bank, said that although a country such as Turkey had a relatively high proportion of female Stem graduates, these women were typically studying natural sciences and becoming teachers, an occupation perceived as “suitable” for women but not classed as Stem, rather than working in a higher-paid engineering field.
“The gender balance in teaching is in favour of women [but] of those enrolled in engineering, only a quarter are women. Digging into these nuances is important because it can help explain and inform ways to remove the drivers of these inequalities,” she said, adding that the data also missed the fact that the number of students choosing to study Stem degrees, male as well as female, was low in all countries.
Ms Munoz-Boudet called for more female role models to encourage more girls to aspire to sectors such as engineering.
Prof Stoet, though, was critical of a “one-sided” push to increase the proportion of women in Stem subjects in developed countries such as the UK.
“Nicky Morgan [former UK education secretary and minister for women and equalities] says we need 80,000 engineers per year, we need more women in Stem,” he said.
“There are many areas where we need skilled people, it’s also true for nurses, teachers, doctors, but we have no one saying ‘we don’t have enough nurses so let’s go to schools and try and get men interested’, so that shows me there is something disingenuous going on.
“Why is it always so one-sided? Why is there always a focus on women in Stem but not men in psychology: 20 per cent of students in Stem are female, 20 per cent of students in psychology are male. There is something funny going on.”
