The STEM Gender Gap in Education

While there’s been a push to improve female representation in education across science, technology, engineering and mathematics, a gap persists in a vast majority of countries - albeit to varying degrees.

UNESCO has been collecting data on which students have enrolled in STEM topics during tertiary education, i.e. education above school age, such as university and vocational courses. The organization analyzed this data using the Gender Parity Index, where a score of 1 equates to full parity between the sexes, while between 0-1 represents a disparity in favor of males and a figure more than 1 is a disparity in favor of females.

Turkey (2022) and Mauritania (2020, data point not shown on this chart) are two of the few countries analyzed where a similar or even slightly higher ratio of women graduated from tertiary STEM programmes than men. A general trend showed that European countries were more skewed towards a lower ratio of women to men in STEM, for example, with Germany recording a score of 0.37, the United Kingdom at 0.37 and Norway at 0.32. Meanwhile, many countries in Asia performed comparatively better, including India at 0.73, Malaysia at 0.48 and Singapore at 0.42.