Conference Program

In Italy, despite the significant growth in women’s participation in higher education, the distribution of fields of study continues to display marked gender polarization. In particular, women remain underrepresented in technological, engineering, and digital fields, while continuing to be overrepresented in the humanities, education, and health-related disciplines. This paper addresses this empirical puzzle by investigating the reasons behind the persistence of disciplinary segregation in university choices despite the expansion of female education and the introduction, over the last decade, of numerous national and European initiatives aimed at promoting girls’ access to STEM disciplines.

This paper analyses the evolution of university enrolments by gender in Italy over the period 2014/2015–2024/2025, with particular attention to STEM fields. The analysis is based on administrative data from the Ministry of University and Research and combines the examination of enrolment shares with the calculation of Duncan’s dissimilarity index, in order to assess whether the expansion of women’s participation in tertiary education has translated into greater convergence in field-of-study choices or whether the structure of segregation has remained substantially stable over time.

The findings show that, over the decade under consideration, the gender distribution of enrolments has remained strongly polarized. Women remain markedly underrepresented in engineering, computer science, and digital technology fields, while women remain the majority in the humanities, education, and health-related disciplines. The dissimilarity index shows limited fluctuations, but no trajectory of structural convergence. This stability is particularly significant, as it persists despite a decade of national and European initiatives aimed at promoting girls’ access to scientific and technological disciplines from the school years onward.

The absence of a convergence dynamic suggests that educational segregation can hardly be interpreted exclusively in terms of individual aptitude differences or reduced exposure of female students to scientific and mathematical subjects during schooling. Such an interpretation is also not fully consistent with the fact that gender polarization does not affect all STEM fields uniformly. Rather, the findings appear more compatible with approaches that emphasize the role of socialization processes, role expectations, and the symbolic representations associated with different fields of study in shaping educational and professional aspirations.

In this perspective, schooling constitutes an important, though not exclusive, node within processes that remain insufficiently explored and that also unfold within broader cultural, familial, and professional contexts. Taken together, this evidence offers a longitudinal empirical contribution to the discussion on the persistence of educational segregation in Italian higher education and calls for greater attention to the cultural, social, and professional contexts within which educational choices take shape.