Addressing Gender Equity in Nigeria's STEM Field

There has always been and still is a low rate of female enrollment in STEM programs in the higher education institutions in Nigeria. Aguele, Idialu, & Aluede (2008), illustrated that even though all Nations have a higher population of women, in most African countries, there has always been a marginalization of women in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). Many factors contribute to this problem of the low rate of women in STEM fields. However, the highlight factors that influence the gender gap in STEM fields in Nigeria, are attributed to the country’s characteristics of patriarchy and gender inequality (Imhanlahimi & Eloebhose, 2006). Nigeria is an androcentric country and is deeply rooted in patriarchy, which limits women’s voices and creative minds. Gender inequality in the STEM field may influence the National Development of a country, and the national development of a country is a countries’ ability to tap into its available resources and utilize it in a manner to bring about an improvement in the standard of living of its citizens (Aguele, Idialu & Aluede, 2008).

For the growth of a nation, it is important to give men and women equitable chances to enroll in STEM programs. This project will be exploring and analyzing how specific factors influence the issue of the low rate of women in the STEM fields in Nigeria. Then, it will explore whether the increase of women in the STEM fields will lead to substantial growth in the nation’s overall development. Just to note, when mentioning about Nigeria’s growth in, it is referring to measuring economic growth by exploring Nigeria’s overall Growth Domestic Product (GDP).

With the use of exploring different data sets, I hope to answer the following questions below:

Will implementing loan and scholarship options for women who choose to enroll in a STEM program increase the rate of women in the STEM fields?

Will the increase of women in the STEM fields in Nigeria lead to a substantial growth of the nation’s overall development/growth? 

To answer the above questions, I explored datasets that came from 3 different data sources. These data sources are the World Bank, The Global Economy, and UNESCO. In addition to these data source, I have included potential datasets which allows for more scenarios to be tested when addressing gender equity in the STEM fields in Nigeria.

 World Bank:  This is an international organization dedicated to providing financing, advice, and research to developing nations to aid their economic advancement. The World Bank is an open data source that provides various datasets to the public. These datasets include data on school completion rates, economic and development indicators, Net attendance rate, out-of-school rates, etc. Most of the World Bank's data is derived from the statistical systems of member countries and the quality of global data depends on how well these national systems perform. One of the main goals of the World Bank data source is to aid developing countries improving the capacity, efficiency, and effectiveness of their national statistical system.

 The Global Economy : This is an open database that provides up-to-date time-series data for a nation's GDP, education indicators, employment rate, etc. Our data set includes over 350 indicators for over 200 countries, with full documentation, updated regularly. They derive many of their data from different data sources. Some of the data sources are National Central Banks, National Statistical Institutes, The World Bank, The United Nations, U.S. Energy Information Administration, International Monetary Fund.

 UNESCO:  This an open data source that provides data on a nation's economic, education, and social indicator, and they seek to build peace through international cooperation in Education, Sciences, and Culture. UNESCO collects its data when UNESCO member states respond annually to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) Survey of Formal Education.

• Gross enrollment ratio in Secondary & Tertiary Education (Female & Male): It is important to investigate the enrollment rate for Nigeria’s Secondary and Tertiary Education. We must explore whether a significant number of people are enrolling in schools in Nigeria, as well as, the portion of the population that are females and males.

• Gender Parity Index in Secondary & Tertiary Education Enrollment: Given that is project is exploring why there is a low rate of women in the STEM fields in Nigeria, Nigeria’s Gender Parity Index (GPI) must be investigated. GPI in education enrollment is the ratio of the number of female students enrolled to the number of male students. The purpose of exploring Nigeria’s GPI is to be able to gauge the nation’s progress towards gender parity in education participation, as well as, learning opportunities available for females compared to those available for males. The data source used for this project that indicates Nigeria’s GPI was derived from World Bank.

• Gross Domestic Product (GDP): This project is looking to investigate the effects on Nigeria’s GDP when there is an increase in women with careers in the STEM fields in Nigeria. The GDP is a vital and major economic indicator, which can help one in determining the growth and decline of an economy. Therefore, it is important to explore Nigeria’s current GDP, to gauge efficiently predict whether our intervention will have a significant effect on Nigeria’s economic growth. A dataset from the Global Economy was used to investigate Nigeria’s overall Economic growth and a dataset from the World Bank that illustrate Nigeria’s GDP per capita growth yearly (%).

Other datasets are vital to my project, but I could not find a data source that had significant data on them. Therefore, I will explore, below, the datasets themselves, and also how these datasets will be gathered. First, the datasets need are:

•  Rate of men enrolled in STEM programs

•  Rate of women enrolled in STEM programs at a Tertiary Level

• Rate of women who graduated from STEM programs

• Rate of women in STEM fields

•  Educational Attainment of At least Bachelors or Equivalent (Male to Female Comparison)

• Educational Attainment of At least Masters or Equivalent (Male to Female Comparison)

•  Educational Attainment of At least Doctoral or Equivalent (Male to Female Comparison)

To gather the above potential datasets, I will explore and gather data from Nigeria's Ministry of Education. One of the main purposes of Nigeria's Ministry of Education is to oversee education in the country. Nigeria's Federal Ministry of Education collects and collates data for planning and financing the Nation's education system. Therefore, the Ministry of Education already possesses raw data on the variables that need to be used to attain potential datasets.

Raw data are data that are unprocessed or unorganized source data. Therefore, to obtain the specific and more organized data for the potential datasets, the raw data gathered from Nigeria's Ministry of Education will need to be processed. The steps to processes these raw data are as follows:

• Data Collection: This is the first step to process potential datasets. Therefore, raw data that comprises of the variables need, will be collected from Nigeria's Ministry of Education.
• Data preparation: Once the raw data is collected, the next step will be to clean and organize the data. The obtain specific, organized, and quality datasets, the raw data needs to be cleaned. Cleaning the raw data collected from Nigeria's Ministry of Education is vital because it improves your data quality.
• Data input: The next step after cleaning the data, will be to put the data into a destination. The now clean potential datasets will be entered into a data warehouse like Redshift.
• Processing: Once the data has been inputted, it will then be processed using a machine learning algorithm. This will allow the data collected to be interpreted.
• Data output/interpretation: The now processed data will be translated into a more reading form, for instance in this case, it will be interpreted in the form of a graph.

Note: If Nigeria's Ministry of Education does not have meaningful raw data to get the potential datasets that are needed, data will be collected by conducting surveys.

(From the Obtained Datasets)

World Bank

The Global economy:  

UNESCO

(From the Potential Datasets)

Based on the datasets explored, one can see that in Nigeria’s education system, males have been leading in terms of them holding the highest enrollment rate, while females have had the lowest rate. However, the data indicates that over time, the margin between the GPI has been decreasing, as the GPI is becoming closer to 1. According to the World Bank, Nigeria’s GPI for secondary and tertiary education enrollment never reached “1”, where a GPI of 1 indicates that males and females are enrolling in the education levels at an equal rate. In other words, a GPI that is less than 1, suggests that females are disadvantaged than males in educational and learning opportunities. As of now the latest GPI data for Nigeria is for the year 2016, and it shows that Nigeria’s GPI is at 0.903. 

Datasets on the Gross enrollment ratio in Secondary & Tertiary Education for Nigeria indicate that more males enroll in schools more than females, and this makes sense since Nigeria has never reached a GPI of 1. The Data from the global economy indicates that in Nigeria there has always been an increase in the overall enrollment rate in Tertiary education which comprises both sexes.

Overall, even though Nigeria’s GPI has never reached 1, in recent time, the rate at which males and females enroll in schools are almost close to equal. Therefore, it is safe to predict that both sexes attain at least a bachelor’s degree at almost the same rates, this then begs the question of why is it that females are not graduating with degrees from STEM programs?

Based on the dataset investigated, we suggest that if Nigeria wants to increase its GDP or overall economic growth, it should put interventions in place that will assimilate and give equitable opportunities and access to males and females when it comes to education, especially is STEM programs. An intervention this project is proposing is for Nigeria to implement loan and scholarship opportunities to females who choose to enroll in STEM programs. These loans and scholarships will allow for females to break through the barriers Nigeria’s patriarchy and androcentric restrictions places on them.

The intended audience for this project is the Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Education and the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). This are two entities that these projects concerns in terms of adopting the proposed intervention/suggestions

 The Federal Ministry of Educations's  mission is “to use education as a tool for fostering the development of all Nigerian citizens to their full potentials, in the promotion of strong, democratic, egalitarian, prosperous, indivisible, indissoluble sovereign nation of God”. Nigerian Ministry of Education has the power to implement an intervention that will make the nation's GPI to become 1, where males and females have equal access to any type of education.

 The Central Bank of Nigeria  monitors the GDP in Nigeria. Some of the responsibilities of CBN is that they "ensure Nigeria's monetary and price stability, promote a sound financial system in Nigeria, and act as Banker and provide economic and financial advice to the Federal Government". Since CBN gives financial advice to the government, proposing this intervention for increasing Nigeria's GDP through the implementation of loans and scholarships options for women who choose to enroll in a STEM program, is something they would be interested in.

Aguele, L. I., Idialu, E. E.,& Aluede, O. (2008). Women's education in science technology and mathematics (STM) challenges for national development. Journal of Instructional Psychology, 35(2), 120-125.

Global economy, world economy. (n.d.). Retrieved from  https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/ 

Imhanlahimi, E. O., & Eloebhose, F. E. (2006). Problems and prospects of women access to science and technology education in Nigeria. COLLEGE STUDENT JOURNAL, (3), 583.

UNESCO. (n.d.). Retrieved from  https://en.unesco.org/ 

World Bank Group - International Development, Poverty, & Sustainability. (n.d.). Retrieved from  https://www.worldbank.org/