Gender stratification in technology: A cross‐national study of career aspirations and their psychological mediators

Abstract Gendered educational aspirations are a key mechanism in the reproduction of gender inequalities. While previous research has linked gender gaps in students' STEM aspirations to differences in competence beliefs and task value, such psychological mechanisms are typically assumed to operate similarly across contexts. In this article, we examine the cross‐national robustness of these mechanisms using data from the International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICILS 2018) covering eight countries. We focus on technology as a particularly male‐dominated STEM domain and analyse eighth‐grade students' aspirations for a technology career. We use logistic regression and the Karlson–Holm–Breen (KHB) decomposition method to assess the extent to which gender differences in competence beliefs, utility value, skills and attitudes explain differences in aspirations. Our results confirm that girls are systematically less likely than boys to aspire to technology‐related careers. While psychological factors explain part of this gap in all countries, the strength and pattern of these factors vary widely. These findings suggest that psychological explanations of educational inequality are themselves context dependent. We argue that research on inequality should consider how these mechanisms differ across national and cultural settings, because processes that seem universal may actually hide context‐specific dynamics.