CRIS Scientific Seminar 2024-2025

Friday, September 6th 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K011 (1, St-Thomas-d'Aquin)

Gendered pathways: How do STEM majors fare in the labor market?

Rosa Weber

Postdoctoral researcher, Stockholm University & INED

There is a rich literature on gender disparities in STEM* fields, especially with a focus on educational trajectories.

While a growing number of studies addresses the later labor market outcomes of women who majored in STEM, there is a notable gap in our understanding of the comprehensive work and family pathways followed by women with STEM majors, as well as how they relate to gender earnings gaps.

In response, we carry out a longitudinal analysis of the pathways followed by men and women with STEM majors, focusing on computer science and engineering.

Exploiting Finnish register data covering the years 1987-2022, we use multi-channel sequence analysis to identify the most common work and family pathways followed by men and women between ages 30 and 40 (N=150,796). In a second step, we study gender differences in the returns to these pathways, in terms of earnings in ages 41-43.

We report two main findings.

 First, we document clear evidence of a leaky pipeline, whereby women are underrepresented in computer science and engineering careers even when we focus on majors from these disciplines.

 Secondly, women earn less across trajectories. However, gender earnings gaps are especially pronounced among parents with careers outside of the field they majored in.

This suggests that the mechanisms pushing men and women to pursue careers outside of their major differ.

* Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics

Open Seminar. Please register here to join us!

To find out more: Personal webpage (Stockholm University)