Education Choices and the Gender Gap in Labour Market Outcomes: The Role of STEM in India

This study examines how early educational choices shape gender inequality in labour-market outcomes in India. Despite rising female education, declining fertility, and sustained economic growth, female labour force participation has remained low. While existing literature links women's education to employment, it largely focuses on the level of education rather than its type. Using nationally representative data from India, we analyze how stream choice at the school level affects employment, occupation, and earnings. Household and sibling fixed effects models show that women who studied science or business are more likely to participate in the labour market, hold salaried jobs, work in male-dominated occupations, and earn higher wages. The corresponding effects for men are smaller, indicating that technical and business education benefit women disproportionately and help narrow gender gaps in these outcomes. These results are robust to alternative specifications, including inverse-probability-weighted regression adjustment. The study demonstrates that women's under-representation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) contributes to occupational segregation and the gender wage gap in the context of an emerging economy.