The Gender Gap in International Internships: What European Data Shows

Across Erasmus+ and most national student mobility programmes, women consistently outnumber men by roughly three to two. This gap has been stable for more than a decade and applies to internship mobility just as it does to study exchanges. The data is unambiguous. What it means for institutional strategy is not.

For university international offices, government mobility programme managers, and HR directors engaging with international placement pipelines, the gender composition of international mobility has practical consequences: for programme design, for widening participation targets, and for the downstream outcomes of students who do and do not go abroad. This analysis draws on longitudinal European data and peer-reviewed research to examine what we actually know about the gender gap in international internships.

1. The Female Majority: A Stable, System-Wide Pattern

The most striking feature of European student mobility data is not the gap itself: it is how stable it has been. Research published in PLOS One analysed Erasmus programme data going back to the early years of the scheme and found female students consistently represented approximately 61% of participants. A decade later, data from the European Commission and the data.europa.eu platform confirm the same ratio holds through 2024, with female participation at around 60% across the full programme spanning more than 1.4 million annual participants.

This is not a gap that has been closing. A 2022 analysis by Di Pietro, published in Higher Education Quarterly, tracked changes in the study-abroad gender gap across 17 European countries and found only a mild trend towards reduction. The underlying structural conditions that produce female over-representation in international mobility have remained largely intact despite significant changes in the higher education landscape over the same period, including near-universal digital access, COVID-19 disruption, and substantial expansion of the Erasmus+ budget.

Comparing this figure to the broader higher education context is instructive. Approximately 58% of university graduates in the EU are female, which means women are not simply over-represented in higher education and dragging up their share of mobility participants proportionally. Female students are participating in Erasmus+ at a rate modestly above what their share of the student population would predict. The gender gap in mobility is real, if smaller than it sometimes appears at first reading.

2. Does the Gap Hold for Internships Specifically?

A common assumption is that the female majority in Erasmus+ statistics is driven primarily by humanities and social science students on study exchanges, where female enrolment is high, and that work placement and internship mobility might tell a different story. The evidence does not support this. The same PLOS One study found that the higher rate of female participation was "practically the same for industrial internships and university exchanges." The 61% female participation rate held when the researchers isolated traineeship mobility from study exchange data.

This is an important finding for placement professionals and HR directors engaging with international placement pipelines. The international intern cohort flowing through Erasmus+ traineeships, bilateral internship programmes, and commercial placement networks is not gender-balanced: it skews female at roughly the same rate as the broader programme. Employers who build their expectations of international intern cohorts around a 50-50 split will consistently find the reality is closer to 60-40, at the programme-wide level.

This does not mean every sector or destination shows the same pattern. The aggregated programme figures mask meaningful variation by field of study, destination country, and placement type. But the directional claim is clear: the assumption of gender balance in international internship cohorts is not supported by the data.

3. The STEM Exception: Where Men Go More

The most significant counter-current within the broader pattern is STEM. Research published in Applied Network Science analysed the gender composition of mobility across the Erasmus university network and found that STEM disciplines show a different picture: male students are over-represented in international mobility in engineering, technology, and the physical sciences, even as female students dominate mobility in arts, humanities, social sciences, education, and health.

This creates a paradox at the institutional level. In a faculty of engineering, international mobility may skew male. In the same university's faculty of arts or social sciences, it will skew substantially female. An aggregate institutional mobility report showing 60% female participation may obscure significant variation by department.

The STEM exception matters for several reasons. First, STEM graduates represent some of the most commercially valued outcomes of international work placements, both for the graduates themselves and for the employers who host them. If male STEM students are disproportionately accessing international internship opportunities, this may compound existing gender dynamics in early career STEM employment. Second, programmes designed to improve male participation in international mobility may find their most receptive audience not in arts or social science faculties, where female over-representation is strongest, but in STEM departments where men are already more engaged but numerical parity with the student body has not been achieved.

4. Country Variations: Who Sends the Most Female Interns

The gender gap is not uniform across Europe. Research on the Erasmus programme found that the gender imbalance in mobility participation is larger in Germany than in France or Italy. This suggests that structural and cultural factors at the national level shape who goes abroad, not just programme-level design choices.

The four largest sending countries in cumulative Erasmus+ participation from 2014 to 2024 are Spain (2.23 million participants), Italy (1.81 million), Germany (1.78 million), and France (1.65 million). These are systems with very different labour market structures, university cultures, and internship norms. The fact that Germany shows a stronger gender gap than France or Italy, despite sending comparable total volumes, points to factors beyond simple participation rates in higher education.

Several country-level explanations have been proposed in the literature. In Germany, the relatively strong apprenticeship and dual-system vocational training track draws male students out of the university pipeline before the Erasmus-eligible stage. In some southern European countries, cultural norms around family proximity may affect male students differently from female ones. In Scandinavia, where gender equity in education is among the highest globally, the gap in mobility participation is often among the smallest in Europe.

For institutions drawing students from specific European markets, the Internship Abroad network covers 16 countries with direct placement infrastructure. Understanding the gender composition of outbound cohorts from each market is useful for employers designing their host programmes and for institutions benchmarking their own mobility performance. Dutch universities send substantial cohorts to Germany, the UK, and Belgium. Czech universities, as covered in our European youth mobility analysis, have seen internship mobility grow significantly in recent years, with a female majority consistent with the broader European pattern.

5. Beyond Binary: A Changing Picture

The standard framing of this discussion in terms of male and female binary categories reflects the categories in which most programme data has historically been collected. This is changing. Data from the EU's data.europa.eu platform, which analysed Erasmus+ mobility from 2014 to 2024, found that participants identifying outside the male/female binary grew from essentially zero at the programme's start to approximately 9% of participants by 2024. This figure is higher than in most national population surveys, likely reflecting both self-selection into international mobility among younger, more globally oriented student populations, and the normalisation of non-binary identity categories in younger European cohorts.

For programme design purposes, this trend points towards a need for mobility programme infrastructure, including housing, health support, and administrative documentation, to move beyond binary categories. Countries and institutions with more progressive legal and administrative frameworks around gender identity are already ahead on this. The Erasmus+ programme itself has updated its data collection to accommodate additional categories, but full institutional alignment across all 33 participating countries remains uneven.

6. How Gender Shapes the Career Return on International Experience

A significant question for universities justifying international placement programmes to students and administrators alike is whether the return on international experience differs by gender. Research in this area produces some nuanced findings that do not always align with what universities assume when they promote internships as universally beneficial.

A 2024 study in Research Policy (Veugelers et al.) examined the relationship between international experience and STEM career outcomes and found a notable gender asymmetry: undertaking internships during university studies, or participating in study abroad programmes, reduced the likelihood of male STEM graduates entering STEM occupations, but had no equivalent effect on women. The proposed mechanism is that international mobility exposes male STEM students to a broader range of career options, making the relatively narrow STEM career path less compelling on return, while female STEM graduates are less likely to leave STEM in the first place because they have already made a deliberate choice to persist in a male-dominated field.

This finding does not argue against international internships for STEM students of any gender. What it suggests is that generic messaging about the career benefits of international experience should be more carefully calibrated. For a male engineering student deciding whether to spend a semester doing an internship in the Netherlands or Germany, the argument "it will boost your career in engineering" may not be entirely accurate. The more accurate framing is "it will expand your options," which may be more or less appealing depending on how committed the student is to a specific career path.

For female students in STEM, the career outcomes data is more unambiguous: international work experience is associated with stronger career progression and higher starting salaries, consistent with the broader graduate employability literature. Our research on international experience and graduate employability covers this evidence base in detail.

7. Why the Gap Persists: What Research Proposes

The persistence of the gender gap in international mobility, despite decades of awareness and multiple institutional equity initiatives, suggests it is driven by structural factors that do not respond easily to programme-level interventions. The research literature proposes several explanations, none individually sufficient but collectively compelling.

Risk tolerance and adventure orientation

International mobility requires confronting unfamiliarity, financial risk, and an extended period away from established social networks. Research consistently finds that women in European university populations report higher international orientation and openness to cultural experience than their male counterparts. This may reflect different socialisation patterns, with female students more likely to have been encouraged towards cultural engagement and language learning from an early age.

Existing social networks and attachment

Male students are, on average, more likely than female students to be in long-distance relationships that make extended international placements difficult, and less likely to have built the kind of peer networks within their institution that support the planning and preparation for mobility. Research suggests that female students are more likely to have friends who have gone abroad, creating social proof and practical advice channels that lower the perceived barriers to going.

Programme and sector alignment

The most internationally mobile academic disciplines, languages, humanities, education, health, are also the most female-dominated. This creates a structural pipeline effect: the programmes that produce the most internationally mobile graduates happen to be the programmes where female students are concentrated. Reversing the overall gender gap in mobility would require either drawing more male students into language and humanities programmes, or successfully increasing international mobility rates among male STEM and business students.

Labour market and career calculus

In labour markets where male STEM graduates face very high demand and strong starting salaries regardless of international experience, the opportunity cost of an extended placement abroad is higher for a male engineering graduate than for a female arts graduate. This is a rational calculation that programme promoters often fail to engage with directly.

8. Implications for Institutional Strategy

International offices and mobility programme managers drawing on this data should resist two opposite errors: treating the gender gap as a problem requiring urgent correction, and ignoring it as a structural feature that doesn't warrant attention.

The female majority in international mobility is not evidence of disadvantage to male students in any straightforward sense. Female students going abroad in higher numbers is, within itself, a positive outcome: it reflects mobility as a route to career development for groups that face other forms of disadvantage in the labour market. The policy question is whether male students who would benefit from international experience are systematically not accessing it, and if so, why.

Practically, institutions that want to improve male participation in international work placements have found most success with three approaches. First, discipline-specific promotion: framing international internships in the language of engineering careers, technology careers, and business development rather than "cultural experience" or "personal growth." Second, peer network activation: identifying male students who have done international placements and deploying them as peer ambassadors in departments with low male participation. Third, integration with career services: treating international internships as a career development tool and embedding placement promotion within career fairs, employer engagement events, and placement weeks, where male students are typically more engaged than in international office-run events.

For governments and mobility programme funders, the gender composition of outbound cohorts is one of several equity dimensions worth tracking alongside socioeconomic background, first-generation status, and disability. The Turing Scheme's explicit focus on disadvantaged student participation offers a useful model for how social equity targets can be built into programme design and assessment. A comparable focus on underrepresented groups in specific fields, including male students in arts and humanities and female students in engineering and technology, would bring additional precision to how "equity in mobility" is defined and measured.

For employers hosting international interns, awareness of the overall gender distribution in international placement pipelines is useful context for cohort planning, mentorship programme design, and reporting on diversity in global talent acquisition. Organisations building structured international internship pipelines through networks such as Internship Abroad Netherlands, Internship Abroad Germany, or the broader EU placement network should expect a cohort that reflects the wider sector pattern rather than a 50-50 distribution, and design their programmes accordingly.

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