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more female students than male students feel underprepared by their high schools to make a career choice or declare a college major, according to the Post-Graduation Readiness Gender Report by YouScience, a technology platform that aims to suss out student aptitudes.
Seventy-nine percent of male high school graduates said they’d been exposed to a variety of career options as high schoolers, compared to 69 percent of female graduates, the report found.
Similarly, 78 percent of male graduates reported that their high schools told them that employers look for candidates with certain aptitudes, and 83 percent felt better prepared to choose an educational or career path because of their aptitudes identified in high school. By contrast, only 68 percent of female graduates said their high schools advised them that employers seek certain aptitudes, while 75 percent said identifying those aptitudes in high school helped prepare them for the future.
Over all, women were more likely (36 percent) than men (31 percent) to feel unprepared to make a career choice or select a major.
The poll, which surveyed about 500 U.S. students from the graduating high school classes of 2020 to 2023, also highlighted trends in female high school graduates’ career plans. In the Class of 2022, 53 percent of female graduates planned to pursue a four-year college degree, compared to 44 percent in this year’s graduating class. The majority of respondents who did not plan to attend a four-year institution instead planned to go to a two-year institution, though 9 percent reported that they had “no plan.”
