Promoting Women's Pathways to Tech Employment: Encouraging Excellence Tracks

This policy paper was conducted in collaboration with the Trump Family Foundation, the TOP15 Initiative for the promotion of excellence in middle schools and Israel Innovation Authority, who has sought to explore possible ways and to propose interventions which may encourage more female students to pursue technological excellence tracks of study, thus reducing the gender gaps in these tracks.
To address this research challenge, we defined a technological excellence track – “tech track” – as a course of studies and accomplishments which comprises the following junctures: the juncture of opting to undertake an excellence program in middle school, the juncture of opting for “high-tech matriculation” in high school, the juncture of being selected for a technological unit during military service, the juncture of enrolling for a “high-tech degree” during academic studies, and the juncture of integrating into employment in a technological position and/or the high-tech sector.
Examining the ratios of males to females along the tech track reveals that gender gaps begin to emerge as early as middle school: in middle school excellence programs, the share of female students is already 40%; in high school, the share of females among students undertaking high-tech matriculation is 35%; during military service, the share of female soldiers in technological positions is around 40%; in academic technology majors, the share of female students is 30% during the first year of studies, and their share among first-degree graduates is 25%; and in the job market, the share of female employees in technological positions, in the high-tech sector, and in R&D positions within the high-tech sector is 31%, 33%, and 20%, respectively.
 
Three key phases account for most of the gender gap along the tech track: participation in an excellence program, studying for high-tech matriculation, and studying for a technology degree. The transition from technology degree studies to employment in the high-tech sector / tech position narrows down the gender gap, and the transition from technology degree studies to employment in an R&D position accounts for around 6% of the gender gap.
The existing gender gaps cannot be explained by differences in abilities between men and women, but rather by the different choices and preferences of boys and girls. Insights regarding the causes for the different choices made by boys and girls in the middle- and high-school phases include: (1) in middle school, girls make decisions more independently than boys (boys tend to seek more assistance from parents and math teachers when making decisions regarding their studies); (2) in middle school, girls assign less importance to the benefits they may derive from technological studies during their military service, and from employment in the high-tech sector upon entering the job market; (3) girls see themselves as less capable than boys with regard to Physics studies, however in Computer Science they see themselves as having equal or higher ability compared to boys.
An important finding of this study is that, in middle school as well as high school, the main reason both boys and girls do not participate in excellence programs is the absence of such programs, or of information regarding their existence. The shortage of homeroom-class excellence programs in middle school, combined with a gender bias favoring boys among math teachers, contribute to gender imbalance in excellence programs and in high-tech matriculation tracks. Since the share of female students who choose high-tech matriculation studies in high school is significantly higher among those who participated in excellence programs during middle school, and since such excellence programs do not operate throughout Israel, this finding may account for a significant part of the heterogeneity in the rate of eligibility for high-tech matriculation among schools.
In light of these findings, we recommend the following measures which may influence the decision of more female students to pursue excellence tracks:
1. Providing every high-school student in Israel with access to high-tech matriculation studies, within their own school or in the framework of super-regional excellence centers and virtual classrooms.
2. Opening AMAT classes in line with the recommendations of the Committee for Increasing Human Capital in High-Tech (“Perlmutter Committee”) and Government Resolution no. 172 – “Accelerating the Labor Market Through Advancing Human Capital and Adapting Skills to the Digital Age”.
3. Emphasizing the promotion of excellence programs directly to female students, alongside better guidance and counselling by the professional staff in schools.
4. Diversity report: advancing gender balance in excellence programs (AMAT, MOFET, Gifted tracks), publicizing diversity data on Transparency in Education website for high-tech matriculation studies, in academia for technology degrees, in the job market for tech positions.
5. Increasing awareness of parents in general, and parents of girls in particular, regarding the contribution of high-tech matriculation to high-quality employment, specifically employment in tech positions and in the high-tech sector.
6. Increasing the exposure to the contribution of “high-tech skills” to the high-quality employment of women.
7. Facilitating broad access to extra-curricular science and programming activities, and encouraging the participation of girls in these activities.
8. Differential budgeting of municipal authorities’ investment in education, based on meeting targets of eligibility for high-tech matriculation in general, and that of female students in particular (requires benchmarks for assessing the effectivenss of programs, along the lines of PISA and MEITZAV exams).
9. Collective Impact activities aiming to increase the share of female students throughout the tech track (accompanied by effectivness measurement to assess the contribution of these programs to raising PISA and MEITZAV scores).
In addition, we recommend devising a plan and setting national targets for the encouragement of:
• Male and female students who are inclined to take 4-unit math matriculation (around 20% [14,000] of girls and around 16% [10,000] of boys), to further expand up to 5 study units.
• Male and female students who are inclined to take 3-unit math matriculation, to expand up to 4 study units.
We also recommend conducting a follow-up study in order to explore whether there are causes for the gender gap as early as kindergarten and primary school ages, and identify ways to encourage the interest of girls in STEM subjects, starting at kindergarten and primary school ages.