%0 Report
        %A Ahimbisibwe, Isaac
%A Altjmed, Adam
%A Artemov, Georgy
%A Barrios-Fernandez, Andres
%A Bizopoulou, Aspasia
%A Kaila, Martti
%A Liu, Jin-Tan
%A Megalokonomou, Rigissa
%A Montalban, Jose
%A Neilson, Christopher A.
%A Sun, Jintao
%A Otero, Sebastian
%A Ye, Xiaoyang
        %T Pipeline vs. Choice: The Global Gender Gap in STEM Applications
        %D 2025
        %8 2025 Aug
        %I Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        %C Bonn
        %7 IZA Discussion Paper
        %N 18092
        %U https://www.iza.org/publications/dp18092
        %X Women account for only 35% of global STEM graduates, a share that has remained unchanged for a decade. We use administrative microdata from centralized university admissions in ten systems to deliver the first cross-national decomposition of the STEM gender gap into a pipeline gap (academic preparedness) and a choice gap (first-choice field conditional on eligibility). In deferred-acceptance platforms where eligibility is score-based, we isolate preferences from access. The pipeline gap varies widely, from -19 to +31 percentage points across education systems. By contrast, the choice gap is remarkably stable: high-scoring women are 25 percentage points less likely than men to rank STEM first.
        %K centralized application platforms
%K STEM gender gap
%K gender inequality