Gender Disparity in STEM Enrolment Across Italian Provinces

Abstract

This paper examines the gender gap in STEM enrolment in first-level courses at Italian universities, focusing on the role played by students’ provinces of origin. STEM enrolment has been modelled as a function of individual and territorial characteristics, considering two sets of covariates: student-level and province-level factors. We employed a multilevel logistic regression model, where students (Level 1) are nested within provinces (Level 2). We introduced random intercepts capturing the provincial variation in the propensity to enrol in STEM and taking into account the clustering of students within provinces. Additionally, we include random slopes for gender to allow the gender effect to vary across provinces. Our findings indicate that provincial differences in STEM enrolment and the gender gap are slight but remain significant even after controlling for individual and territorial characteristics.