Conference Program

Gender inequalities remain deeply embedded within STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields. In Italy, only 16.6% of women aged 25–34 hold a STEM degree compared with 34.5% of men (ISTAT, 2023). This gap reflects the persistence of cultural stereotypes and the limited visibility of female role models in scientific careers(Bilimoria & Lord, 2014; Cheryan et al., 2017). Previous research highlights how social and professional role models shape educational aspirations and influence both students’ and families’ decision-making processes regarding educational pathways (De Vita & Giancola, 2017; Jaoule-Grammare 2024).

Although girls increasingly display higher expectations toward tertiary education (OECD 2025), contributing to the ongoing feminisation of higher education in Italy, STEM fields remain strongly gendered. Structural and cultural mechanisms coexist: while women’s investment in higher education has expanded across Western countries, traditional beliefs portraying STEM disciplines as more suitable for boys continue to influence educational choices, reinforced by gendered performance expectations in mathematics during schooling. Educational expansion therefore coexists with persistent gendered representations of professions.

The project WHEN – Women in science: wHere wE staNd? investigated gender stereotypes related to STEM careers among upper-secondary students, examining how these perceptions shape educational and occupational expectations and how social origin interacts with university choice processes (Arnaboldi et al. 2025).

The study involved 1,642 students enrolled in the fourth and fifth year of upper-secondary schools who participated, between 2023 and 2025, in university orientation initiatives organised by the University of Milan. For the present analysis, we focus on students attending Scientific Lyceum (Italian academic-track upper secondary school) programmes. The analytical sample includes 430 students who completed the pre-intervention questionnaire and a subsample of 205 students who completed both pre- and post-intervention surveys. Data were analysed using paired-sample t-tests, chi-square tests and ANOVA.

Preliminary findings reveal persistent gender stereotypes: male students tend to underestimate female peers’ mathematical abilities, while female students identify work–family reconciliation as a major perceived barrier to scientific careers. However, post-intervention results indicate a reduction in stereotypical perceptions, particularly among female students, who report lower levels of discouragement related to the perceived incompatibility between scientific careers and private life.

By linking gender stereotypes, social origin and educational expectations within a pre–post intervention design, this study contributes to understanding how gender inequalities in STEM are produced not only through structural constraints but also through anticipatory processes shaping students’ imagined futures and perceived opportunity structures (Jaoule-Grammare 2024).

Many studies, especially in science education research, investigate how gender stereotypes (GS) may affect teachers’ teaching attitudes and practices [1-3] and, also, students’ attitudes [4] and interest towards STEM disciplines [5]. GS may act, implicitly and explicitly, in school context [6-8]: for example reinforcing the idea that individuals have different chance to succeed in STEM fields on the basis of their gender. Thus these stereotypes may contribute to discourage girls to choose certain study areas, such as engineering or physics, that result to be male dominated fields and, at the same time, may discourage boys to study disciplines, such as biology, that results to be female dominated [9].

Despite the large number of studies investigating how GS influence the teachers and the students, very little of this research filters through and have an impact on school practice, in particular in Italy. This is mainly due to structural shortcomings in teacher training that in our country fails to offer teachers structured training focused on enabling them to access the latest studies in the field of Research in Education and in Science Education. This clearly emerge from the analysis of the curricula of the courses for Italian perspective teachers including only 16 CFU (1 CFU ranges from 5 to 8 hours of lessons) addressing discipline content and, only in some cases, pedagogical content knowledge [10].

To address this issue, supported by a large collaboration of Unified Guarantee Committee (CUG) of Research Institutions and Universities, we develop a wide initiative focused on supporting teachers to develop competences useful to design and implement Research-Based Teaching-Learning activities specifically focused on supporting their students to recognize and deconstruct GS thus to allow students to make more informed choices about their future.

We considered that many different and intertwined causes contribute to the existence and persistence of GS: the socio-economic context in which individuals live, family context, teachers’ and peers’ attitudes and ideas, etc. As these factors are related to many different research fields, we involved colleagues from different research areas – e.g. sociology, psychology, linguistics, etc - in teachers’ training to support participants to delve deeper into the latest results from research addressing GS in different areas. Researchers and teachers co-designed activities to be implemented in classrooms. These activities included the design of a structured interview protocol that students’ will use to interview male and female STEM researchers. All the interviews will be part of a Podcast sponsored by the network of the involved CUG.

Overall about 90 teachers were involved in our initiative. To assess the pilot edition of the initiative, we collected qualitative feedback from both the involved teachers and researchers. In particular, teachers shared with us notes and observations about the training course and the activities implemented in classrooms. These feedback from these notes and observations will be the base for revising topics addressed in the first edition of the initiative and to improve the co-designed teaching-learning activities. We will present details of our teaching training initiatives describing results from the pilot implementation.

Italian data show a persistent underrepresentation of women in the STEM-related learning path (European Commission, 2025). Similar trends are evident in the percentage of women employed in the technical, IT and engineering work sectors. CNEL-ISTAT data confirm that the gender gap is still an issue that affects the careers and learning trajectories of young women, both in terms of horizontal segregation (greater concentration in a small number of professions) and vertical segregation (effective access to qualified professions or top positions within organizations) (Freguja et al., 2025). Persistent gender stereotypes contribute to this picture, which translate into social and family influence from childhood (Ghigi, 2019; Biemmi & Mapelli, 2017; Sità, 2025).

In pedagogical terms, it is important to understand how gender stereotypes and expectations manifest in the cultures and practices of educational institutions and actors, whether they are formal, informal, or non-formal. Observing this phenomenon, it emerges that not only visible barriers affect girls and young women’s paths, but also invisible ones are based on implicit educational models of parents, teachers and other subjects with care responsibilities, often translating into a real orientation conditioned by gender (Mapelli et. al, 2001; Hussénius, 2020; De Gioannis, 2022; Bonvini et al., 2023). To prevent educational inequalities, it becomes important to decode the formative cultures that run through the daily lives of girls at school, in the family and in the world of peers (Biemmi, 2020; Lopez, 2022) to invest in those protective factors that can help reduce the gender gap.

In this framework, this presentation offers insights based on three workshops, conducted as part of the international project “STAR Girls - Supporting Talent & Ambition in Renewable Energy Sector for Girls” (Erasmus PLUS), with the aim of promoting greater participation of young girls in the clean and renewable energy sector, through mentoring paths. The workshops have involved professionals from the technical sectors, human resources managers, teachers and representatives of the educational world, researchers and scholars. The workshops were designed as opportunities for discussion and dialogue about the obstacles and facilitators of women’s participation in STEM-related training and professions.

The first outcomes highlight consolidated barriers, alongside less visible aspects. Some female participants shared their experiences entering contexts perceived as "men-only worlds," expressing their fears and strategies for negotiating belongings (Hussénius, 2020). The need to question not only careers traditionally precluded to girls but also those implicitly precluded to boys emerges. This makes visible how gender stereotypes act in both directions in the construction of professional imaginaries (Ottaviano & Persico, 2020). Finally, a broader reflection on the meaning of entering STEM for girls emerges: not only as a functional choice for employability or individual success according to neoliberal logic, but also as a meaningful choice capable of opening up perspectives of agency, transforming contexts, and redefining professional identities.

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.

Gender disparities in educational and career pathways emerge
early in development and persist throughout the life course, with girls
and boys exhibiting divergent patterns in subject performance, educational
track selection, and occupational aspirations. These differences are
shaped substantially by parental gender biases that influence children’s
perceptions, attitudes, and educational decisions from early schooling
onward [1][2].
Despite growing recognition of this phenomenon, literature reveals significant
measurement limitations: most existing instruments lack rigorous
psychometric validation, fail to integrate assessment across multiple educational
domains (i.e. subjects, school tracks, and professional roles),
and focus disproportionately on STEM-related biases while neglecting
complementary stereotypes in humanities and social sciences[3].
This study addresses these gaps by developing and validating a psychometrically
sound instrument to measure school-related gender bias,
administered to two nationally representative samples: 2,215 parents of
adolescents aged 12–16 and 1,916 young adults aged 18–25. Data were
collected through a structured online questionnaire administered between
July and August 2025 as part of the EduCAR Youth project. Both samples
were drawn using quota sampling stratified by geographical area and
municipality size to ensure national representativeness, and are balanced
by gender and age.
We employed Item Response Theory (IRT) to construct the measurement
scale, using a two-parameter logistic (2PL) model to convert pattern of
responses in a latent trait score indicating the degree of presence of gender
bias [4] [5]. Exploratory factor analysis revealed a clear unidimensional
structure in both samples, with the first factor explaining approximately
70% of total variance. The instrument consists of 11 items covering
three domains: academic subjects (i.e., mathematics, literature, social
sciences), school tracks (i.e., classical lyceum, scientific lyceum, technical

institutes), and professional roles (i.e., engineering/IT professions, leadership
positions, care-oriented professions). The scale performed consistently
across both samples, demonstrating excellent internal consistency
(ω = 0.95), high item discrimination (parents: 1.94–3.35; young adults:
1.92–3.13), satisfactory fit statistics, and a TIF > 15 peaking at higher
levels of the latent trait. Differential Item Functioning analysis supported
partial measurement invariance, with 9 out of 11 items functioning equivalently
across samples.
Young adults (M = 0.45, SD = 0.70) showed significantly higher gender
bias than parents (M = 0.18, SD = 0.59; Kruskal–Wallis Test, p < .001).
In the parents’ sample, gender bias was significantly higher among fathers,
parents of boys, younger parents, residents of Central and Northern
Italy, and those with either high or low occupational status. Higher bias
was also associated with the use of private tutoring, remedial lessons,
and local educational support services, as well as expectations that children
would attend technical rather than academic secondary tracks. In
the young adults’ sample, higher bias levels were found among men,
residents outside the Islands, workers compared with students, those not
planning to have children, and individuals with lower levels of education.
The validated 11-item scale offers a brief, psychometrically robust tool
for screening gender bias across educational domains in both research
and applied settings. Future research should examine longitudinal relationships
between bias and educational outcomes, test cross-cultural
generalizability, and incorporate implicit measurement approaches [3].