Critical Factors in the Participation of Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics -STEM- Disciplines in Mexico

Currently, women participate in STEM areas, still with a very marked gender gap. Taking this as a reference, in this work, an investigation has been carried out based on questionnaires applied to students of STEM careers. The information obtained was analyzed using multi-criteria decision methods. In particular, the Order of Preference by Similarity to the Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method was applied to determine the most favorable conditions for women to study a STEM career. Through this analysis, this research has found that women's choice of a STEM career is strongly influenced firstly by the father's profession, secondly by the mother's profession, and also has a positive impact on the discrimination to which the person has been subjected, self-motivation. And self-esteem. These results indicate that it is necessary to influence the early educational stages to provide support from the family and school environment to women so that they develop their skills around STEM careers. In future work, the data obtained could be analyzed in greater depth, considering that the richness of the open responses may be lost by coding the respondents’ opinions as categorical variables. ©Springer.