High School Enrollment Choices -- Understanding the STEM Gender Gap

Abstract

Students' high school decisions will always impact efforts to achieve gender parity in STEM at the university level and beyond. Without a comprehensive understanding of gendered disparities in high school course selection, it will be impossible to close completely the gender gap in many STEM disciplines. This study examines eleven years of detailed administrative data to determine gendered enrolment trends in university-stream secondary school STEM courses. Male and female enrolments for all publicly funded secondary schools across the province of Ontario (N = 844) were tracked from the 2007/08 academic year to 2017/18. The data reveal a clear trend of growing enrolment in STEM disciplines, with the increase in female students continuing their STEM education significantly outpacing males in almost all courses. However, these results also demonstrate the disparities that persist across STEM disciplines. The existing gender gap in physics remains large - in 2018, the median grade 12 physics class was only $36.5\pm0.05%$ female - with virtually no progress having been made to close this gap. By tracking individual student cohorts, we also demonstrate a newly discovered result showing the continuation rate of male students in biology stream courses has experienced a precipitous drop-off. The proportion of male students continuing from grade 10 science to grade 12 biology two years later has seen an average yearly decline of $-0.44\pm0.08$ percentage points, potentially foreshadowing the emergence of another significant gender gap in STEM. We suggest that researchers and educators cease treating STEM as a monolith when addressing gender disparities, as doing so obscures significant differences between disciplines. Future efforts, particularly those aimed to support women in STEM, must instead adopt a more targeted approach to ensure that they solve existing problems without creating new ones.