The underrepresentation of girls and women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields is a continual concern for social scientists and policymakers. Using an international database on adolescent achievement in science, mathematics, and reading ( N = 472,242), we showed that girls performed similarly to or better than boys in science in two of every three countries, and in nearly all countries, more girls appeared capable of college-level STEM study than had enrolled. Paradoxically, the sex differences in the magnitude of relative academic strengths and pursuit of STEM degrees rose with increases in national gender equality. The gap between boys' science achievement and girls' reading achievement relative to their mean academic performance was near universal. These sex differences in academic strengths and attitudes toward science correlated with the STEM graduation gap. A mediation analysis suggested that life-quality pressures in less gender-equal countries promote girls' and women's engagement with STEM subjects.

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The authors hypothesized that action planning leads to the temporal binding of response codes, which then are less available for the planning of other actions. Four experiments showed evidence for this code occupation hypothesis. In Experiment 1, participants prepared a left or right finger movement (A), performed another left-right choice reaction (B), and then executed Action A. In case of a partial feature overlap between A and B, reaction time for B increased. The same was true in Experiment 2, in which B was performed with the left or right foot. Experiment 3 showed that response-feature binding occurred only when there was sufficient time to form a plan. When A was precued but not intentionally prepared, feature overlap produced a decrease in reaction time. Experiment 4 revealed that A benefited from feature overlap with B at short delays but not at longer delays between B and A. This finding was presumably due to leftover activation in feature codes after plan execution, whereas overlap costs in B were unaffected by delay.