Few graduate (and doctoral) students in Stem

It is now 11 years since the UN introduced the International Day of Women and Girls in Science on 11 February. And it has been two since our country extended it to an entire week starting on the 4th of the same month. Not to mention the decision, dating back to the post-Covid period, to provide scholarships increased by 20% for girls enrolling in a Stem degree course, or the many similar initiatives planned by universities, companies, trade associations and the third sector.

In the face of such a communication and orientation battle, the results are hard to see. The Talents Venture Observatory had already provided a warning ten days ago, pointing out that the proportion of girls with a technical-scientific qualification had even decreased over the last decade. Last Wednesday, in the wake of all the celebrations, the counter-evidence also arrived, with AlmaLaurea's Gender Report 2026, which dedicates an entire focus to the topic with emblematic results: 'Gender segregation in Stem courses,' reads the first lines of the chapter, 'is now structural. The numbers speak for themselves. According to the document, the presence of women in these fields remains low and is 41.1% among graduates in 2024, substantially unchanged from 2025. Especially when compared to the average 60% of total graduates.

As we reported in Il Sole 24 ore on Thursday 12 February, women shine in the classroom and in university lecture halls, excelling in terms of graduation rate, graduation rate, completion of studies etc.. But then they get lost in the labour market. And they remain at a disadvantage both in terms of employment and return on earnings. Due to die-hard social and family conditioning. One cannot explain otherwise that 95% female presence in single-cycle degree courses in the Education and Training group. The 41.1% of female graduates in the Stem areas is even more impressive when compared to the 62% of degrees obtained by women in the Economic, Legal and Social and Health and Agro-Veterinary areas or the 79.6% in the Artistic, Literary and Education area.

Complicating the picture is the fact that the gender gap in science subjects becomes even more pronounced when we move on to analyse the next educational step, i.e. PhDs. Here women account for 36.7 per cent of Stem doctoral students in 2024, while in the other subject areas they always account for over 50 per cent.

This brings us to the labour market, which notoriously rewards graduates from Stem courses. Examining the 2019 second-level graduates five years after their degree, the AlmaLaurea survey highlights their high employment rate, with a gender differential of 3.7 percentage points in favour of men, in line with what has been observed for graduates as a whole. Stem women - the report continues - carry out self-employment more frequently than men, with a differential of 3.9 percentage points, in contrast with what is observed in general (-1.1 percentage points). On the other hand, the greater prevalence of open-ended employment contracts among men is confirmed, while fixed-term contracts are more common among women.