Career aspirations in STEM: Gender differences and similarities at Year 9 Publications
Publication Details
New Zealand’s TIMSS 2019 data is used to investigate Year 9 students’ aspirations to pursue a career in a STEM-related field. It was inspired by the release of Missing out on half of the world’s potential: Fewer female than male top achievers in mathematics and science want a career in these fields, published by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in April 2022.
Author(s): Emel Okur Berberoglu and Megan Chamberlain
Date Published: December 2022
Key Findings
- Year 9 students recognised the importance of doing well in mathematics and science to either enter a tertiary education programme or pursue a job they wanted however they were still relatively reluctant to pursue a career in either field.
- Year 9 boys (51%) were more likely than Year 9 girls (39%) to want to pursue a career in mathematics. Generally, boys were more confident studying mathematics than girls.
- Boys with high confidence in mathematics were also more likely than girls with high confidence to want to pursue a career in this field (OR 2.381 and OR 1.36 respectively). Likewise, higher achieving boys were more likely than higher achieving girls to have career aspirations in a mathematics field (OR 1.65 compared with OR 0.67).
- Boys (46%) and girls (48%) were equally likely to want to pursue a career in science. Generally, they had similar confidence studying science.
- Girls with high confidence in science (60%) however were somewhat more likely than confident boys (58%) to want to pursue a science-related career (OR 2.32 and OR 1.86 respectively). Higher achieving girls were at least as likely than their higher achieving male peers to want to pursue a science-related career (OR 1.21 compared with OR 1.02).
- Over the last 20 years, the gap between girls’ and boys’ aspirations for a mathematics-related career, which favoured boys, has remained the same. For science however, the picture is a little different. The gap between girls’ and boys’ aspirations for a science-related career has decreased markedly since 2014, largely due to increasing proportions of girls wanting a career in this field.
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