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A study by Huy Le, associate professor of management at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), has identified factors that could lead more young students to successful careers in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) fields.
"People seek out the environment that fits their personal characteristics," Le said. "If they work in an arena that suits them, they'll be happy and successful. With these predictors, we can identify students with potential for obtaining a STEM degree nearly a decade before they pursue it."
Le also found no difference between the abilities of girls and boys to succeed in STEM, based on these two predictors. Essentially, if a girl and a boy have the same amount of interest and ability to succeed, they are each entirely capable of doing so.
"There are many theories about the social pressure that keeps women out of STEM," he said. "We found that young men in general were more interested in the field, but considering that young women showed the same ability in our study, that seems to suggest that the dearth of women in the field is probably due to societal factors."
Le notes that many students, especially women, who excel cognitively also have excellent verbal ability and will often choose a career other than STEM because they have so many opportunities before them. Le says that educators and counselors can influence those decisions by simply introducing students to the benefits of a career in science or engineering.
"This is a critical issue in our economy right now," he said. "We have a crippling deficit of participants in the STEM field, and if we can encourage our students to pursue this path, we'll be on our way to eradicating [the issue]."
The full report, Building the STEM pipeline: Findings of a 9-year longitudinal research project (pdf), is available at Research Gate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 15 2016, @02:18PM
And identified that having more female math and science teachers in high school helps to steer women into STEM. So looks like we have a catch 22 here. http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/education/female-science-math-teachers-stem-students [journalistsresource.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 15 2016, @06:56PM
Only if they are confident otherwise they can make things worse:
https://news.uchicago.edu/article/2010/01/25/female-teachers-can-transfer-fear-math-and-undermine-girls-math-performance [uchicago.edu]
http://www.pnas.org/content/107/5/1860.full [pnas.org]
Women on average tend to be more risk averse than men.
Not surprising since the human species could tolerate a far higher death/cripple rate for males than females. In the old old days if you suddenly remove 75% or even 90% of the males it wouldn't really slow down the population growth rate much (aside from the initial removal of course). So the males can go do risky stuff, push the limits, etc while they are young and if they survive despite all that they might get to pass their genes on. But now civilization is more fragile, a lot of it depends on tons of specialists. 1 farmer feeds more than a 100 other people. And to continue feeding 100+ other people the farmer is dependent on others.