The role of environment on women’s perception about their STEM studies: observations from a Global South country

Abstract

The growing global demand for STEM professionals is not being met by the supply of new graduates, a supply that is characterised by a significant lag in the percentage of women pursuing STEM studies. Interestingly enough, the percentage of female applicants entering STEM majors has been increasing yet only a minority of them pursue, or complete, engineering programs. Several studies for the developed world have identified several environmental factors responsible for this phenomenon. The scarcity of engineering professionals is a handicapping factor for development, even for the most advanced countries of the Global South. The objective of this exploratory study is to examine whether the environmental factors identified in the international literature are sufficient to explain the asymmetry in selecting an engineering or a natural sciences career among female undergraduates in an exemplary Global South country, Kazakhstan. To this purpose, a multifaceted survey was conducted among the female students pursuing STEM majors in the premier Kazakhstani university in the academic year 2021–2022. This study utilized a Likert Scale questionnaire, ordinal logistic regression, and factor analysis to explore factors affecting female students. Data reliability was confirmed through Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). The factor and regression analysis of the results obtained demonstrates that there is no discernible difference between the observations in the literature and the situation in Kazakhstan.