  Citation: de las Cuevas, P.; García-Arenas, M.; Rico, N. Why Not STEM? A Study Case on the Inﬂuence of Gender Factors on Students’ Higher Education Choice. Mathematics 2022, 10, 239. https:// doi.org/10.3390/math10020239 Academic Editors: Michael Voskoglou and David Pugalee Received: 5 November 2021 Accepted: 7 January 2022 Published: 13 January 2022 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional afﬁl- iations. Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). mathematics Article Why Not STEM? A Study Case on the Inﬂuence of Gender Factors on Students’ Higher Education Choice Paloma de las Cuevas 1,† , Maribel García-Arenas 1,† and Nuria Rico 2, * ,† 1 Department of Computer Architecture and Computer Technology, University of Granada, 18014 Granada, Spain; palomacd@ugr.es (P.d.l.C.); mgarenas@ugr.es (M.G.-A.) 2 Department of Statistic and Operational Research, University of Granada, 18003 Granada, Spain * Correspondence: nrico@ugr.es † These authors contributed equally to this work. Abstract: The gender gap in STEM-related job positions is a fact, and it is closely related to the low percentage of women studying STEM degrees. This poses a problem because Europe, as well as the United States and the rest of the developed countries, keep demanding the best engineers and scientists to continue developing innovative products. This problem can thus be approached by answering, ﬁrstly, the following question: Why are women not studying STEM degrees? In this paper, we summarize the factors, found in literature, that inﬂuence students—both boys and girls—to not study STEM, particularly engineering, computer sciences and technology. We study these inﬂuence factors in a sample of N = 338 students from a secondary school placed in the south of Spain; we carry out a survey in order to ﬁnd out if those students ﬁll out the same answers other researchers have found and published in the related literature. Our main conclusions are as follows: The results conﬁrm that the number of women in technical courses decreases when the level of the course increases; the lack of role models is not an impediment for girls to feel comfortable; unlike boys, girls will not choose engineering, even if their scoring in STEM is good; and we found that girls and women see themselves as not capable of studying an engineering degree more than boys and men do. These results contribute to a deeper understanding of the situation regarding the gender gap in STEM ﬁelds in ages in which both girls and boys must choose their future studies. Keywords: STEM; gender gap in STEM; engineering perception; high school education; women in science 1. Introduction The origin of the concept of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) is discussed by Kennedy et al. [1]. Scholars are agreed that STEM develops a new learning approach based on placing students in a learning and practicing context so that they can apply their knowledge and also achieve higher-order thinking competences such as problem-solving, critical thinking and creative thinking (see [2–4]). In this manuscript, we consider, as the OECD does, the term STEM referring the aggregation of the broad ﬁelds of natural sciences, mathematics and statistics, information and communication technologies and engineering, manufacturing and construction. In STEM ﬁelds, according to OECD data shown in [5], 84% of 25–64 year-old adults with a degree in natural sciences, mathematics and statistics were employed in 2020 on average across OECD countries, and demand is strong for those with an engineering or ICT degree, where employment peaks close to 90%. Considering the high demand of scientists and engineers in Europe, remarked in [6], several institutions and governments have mobilised in order to try to make students more interested in STEM, as the OECD showed in [7]. In addition, we observe in [8–11] that there exists a persistent under-representation of women in STEM areas. In [5], the OECD report points out that “women are less likely than men to enter a STEM ﬁeld of study, although this share has increased in slightly Mathematics 2022, 10, 239. https://doi.org/10.3390/math10020239 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/mathematics