– Stronger performance environments have a negative impact on student career aspirations in STEM.
– Although girls are less likely than boys to aspire to STEM occupations, even when they have comparable abilities, boys respond more than girls to competitive school performance environments. As a consequence, the aspirations gender gap narrows for high-performing students in stronger performance environments. The authors also show that those effects are larger in countries that do not sort students into different educational tracks.
– Countries display heterogeneity in the effects of the school performance environment on STEM aspirations and in particular the impact of the performance environment on student decision-making in response to their own level of math-science performance. Some of this country variation can be attributed to country differences in the structure of tracking.
– In early tracking school systems, STEM aspirations are generally higher in the high performing schools (the “academic” track). In untracked school systems, STEM aspirations are generally higher at any given level of own performance in low-performing schools, and this gap in favor of low-performing schools grows as own performance increases.
– Boys respond more strongly to their own performance than do girls in environments that provide weak signals from tracking and in environments where peer performance is weak, which seems to induce strongly performing boys more than girls to draw the conclusion that they belong in STEM occupations. In environments with strong environmental performance, the gender gap in STEM aspirations shrink.
– In the United States, boys and girls have comparable aspirations at average ability levels without regard to school environments, but boys have larger math-science slopes, with diminishing gender differences in effects in stronger performance environments.