IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jmathe/v10y2022i2p239-d723695.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Why Not STEM? A Study Case on the Influence of Gender Factors on Students’ Higher Education Choice

Author

Listed:
  • Paloma de las Cuevas

    (Department of Computer Architecture and Computer Technology, University of Granada, 18014 Granada, Spain
    These authors contributed equally to this work.)

  • Maribel García-Arenas

    (Department of Computer Architecture and Computer Technology, University of Granada, 18014 Granada, Spain
    These authors contributed equally to this work.)

  • Nuria Rico

    (Department of Statistic and Operational Research, University of Granada, 18003 Granada, Spain
    These authors contributed equally to this work.)

Abstract

The gender gap in STEM-related job positions is a fact, and it is closely related to the low percentage of women studying STEM degrees. This poses a problem because Europe, as well as the United States and the rest of the developed countries, keep demanding the best engineers and scientists to continue developing innovative products. This problem can thus be approached by answering, firstly, the following question: Why are women not studying STEM degrees? In this paper, we summarize the factors, found in literature, that influence students—both boys and girls—to not study STEM, particularly engineering, computer sciences and technology. We study these influence factors in a sample of N = 338 students from a secondary school placed in the south of Spain; we carry out a survey in order to find out if those students fill out the same answers other researchers have found and published in the related literature. Our main conclusions are as follows: The results confirm that the number of women in technical courses decreases when the level of the course increases; the lack of role models is not an impediment for girls to feel comfortable; unlike boys, girls will not choose engineering, even if their scoring in STEM is good; and we found that girls and women see themselves as not capable of studying an engineering degree more than boys and men do. These results contribute to a deeper understanding of the situation regarding the gender gap in STEM fields in ages in which both girls and boys must choose their future studies.

Suggested Citation

  • Paloma de las Cuevas & Maribel García-Arenas & Nuria Rico, 2022. "Why Not STEM? A Study Case on the Influence of Gender Factors on Students’ Higher Education Choice," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 10(2), pages 1-16, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:gam:jmathe:v:10:y:2022:i:2:p:239-:d:723695
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7390/10/2/239/pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7390/10/2/239/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Gustavo Morán-Soto & Omar Israel González Peña, 2022. "Second Phase of the Adaptation Process of the Mathematics Self-Efficacy Survey (MSES) for the Mexican–Spanish Language: The Confirmation," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 10(16), pages 1-17, August.
    2. Rodrigo Sánchez-Jiménez & Iuliana Botezan & Jesús Barrasa-Rodríguez & Mari Carmen Suárez-Figueroa & Manuel Blázquez-Ochando, 2023. "Gender imbalance in doctoral education: an analysis of the Spanish university system (1977–2021)," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(4), pages 2577-2599, April.
    3. Gabriela Ortiz-Martínez & Patricia Vázquez-Villegas & María Ileana Ruiz-Cantisani & Mónica Delgado-Fabián & Danna A. Conejo-Márquez & Jorge Membrillo-Hernández, 2023. "Analysis of the retention of women in higher education STEM programs," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 10(1), pages 1-14, December.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gam:jmathe:v:10:y:2022:i:2:p:239-:d:723695. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MDPI Indexing Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mdpi.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.