Grant Term
Two years
A Study to Examine How to Encourage More Female Students to Choose Excellence Tracks
A Study to Examine How to Encourage More Female Students to Choose Excellence Tracks Leading to a Career in High-Tech
A Study to Examine How to Encourage More Female Students to Choose Excellence Tracks Leading to a Career in High-Tech
Israel’s phenomenal success in high tech is a remarkable achievement. From 2017 to 2021 the rate of employees in high-tech grew from 9% to 11.9%, with one in six young Israelis working in a tech job. During the pandemic’s lockdowns, the high-tech sector in Israel grew by 11.4%, leading the Israeli economy to maintain stability even through global turmoil. As a result, high-tech has become a synonym for a new Israeli dream, fueling the hopes and dreams of many Israeli youngsters and the motivation of many parents and students across the country.
However, the expansion of high-tech in Israel is very biased towards the Jewish male population residing in the affluent metropolitan center of Israel. Females comprise only one-third of excellence classes in middle school, high achievers on the PISA mathematics test, high school students of physics and computers, engineering students at the university, and employees of R&D departments in high-tech companies. This phenomenon may be changing, with the transformation in the five-unit track of mathematics in high school, in which female students currently constitute almost 50%.
In order to explore why female students refrain from choosing to study in excellence tracks leading to high-tech, we approached the Aaron Institute at Reichman University. The Aaron Institute is an economic research think tank with which we collaborated on a previous study that focused on the skills needed for high-tech. The previous research made an important contribution to the work of the government’s committee on high-tech human capital, pointing to the importance of studying mathematics, English, physics and computers at a five-unit level in high school.
The Aaron Institute proposes to analyze the big databases of the Central Bureau of Statistics and the Ministry of Education and identify trends along the years and to search for the characteristics that distinguish between women (not including ultra-Orthodox Jewish women) who choose to pursue excellence tracks and those who chose not to. They will then conduct focus groups and interviews with middle school, high school and university students, as well as with female high-tech employees, in order to reach a deeper understanding of their considerations in selecting their paths in life. The findings and recommendations will be disseminated to policymakers, the professional community, and the public.
* The text above shows the grant as approved by the Foundation’s Board of Directors / Grant 503