High School Gender Composition and University STEM Major Choice in British Columbia

Administrative data from British Columbia, Canada, investigates the effect of high school peer gender composition on university STEM major selection. The analysis exploits within-school variation in gender composition across different high school types and education stages. The dataset supports the replication of findings that show differing effects by student gender.

Use Cases

• Analyze the relationship between high school gender composition and university STEM major choice using administrative records.
• Investigate how the effects of peer gender composition differ across student gender and high school type.
• Replicate econometric models exploiting within-school variation in gender composition to identify causal effects on major selection.

Strengths

• Data is sourced from official administrative records, ensuring high reliability.
• Analysis is grounded in a specific policy-relevant context: British Columbia, Canada.
• The replication package is associated with a peer-reviewed research question on gender and education.

Limitations

• The dataset's specific row count, column structure, and file formats are unknown, limiting immediate usability assessment.
• Geographic scope is restricted to a single Canadian province, reducing generalizability.
• Data freshness is unclear as the administrative records may not be recent, given the last update is a future date (2026-02-23).

Provenance

Source

ICPSR Harvested Dataverse

Collection Method

Administrative data from British Columbia, Canada, analyzed for research replication.

Freshness

Last metadata update is listed as 2026-02-23, but the underlying administrative data's temporal coverage is null.

Geography

British Columbia, Canada