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Girls vs Boys in STEM and non-STEM

posted by martyb on Monday December 10 2018, @01:33AM   
from the unexpected-causes dept.

hendrikboom writes:

In a landmark study involving over a million students, it appears that the reason boys dominate girls in STEM fields is not that they are better than girls at it (the reverse seems to be true) but, perversely, that gender differences are lower in non-STEM fields.

About the STEM grades, which are often abused as an explanation:

A classroom with more variable grades indicates a bigger gap between high and low performing students, and greater male variability could result in boys outnumbering girls at the top and bottom of the class.

“Greater male variability is an old idea that people have used to claim that there will always be more male geniuses – and fools – in society,” O’Dea says.

The team found that on average, girls’ grades were higher than boys’, and girls’ grades were less variable than boys’.

But girls' and boys' variability were much closer in non-STEM fields.

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Original Submission

• Re:Another gut-punch to bigots Re:Another gut-punch to bigots (Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday December 10 2018, @03:32AM (1 child)

  by The Mighty Buzzard (18) <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Monday December 10 2018, @03:32AM (#772233) Homepage Journal

  It's not being debunked. Their study reinforced it as I noted above [soylentnews.org].

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• Re:Another gut-punch to bigots (Score: 2) by zocalo on Monday December 10 2018, @08:14AM

  by zocalo (302) on Monday December 10 2018, @08:14AM (#772277)

  While you're right about the bait and switch in the other comment, this study actually isn't even addressing the OP's point about what draws students to a given field. It's purely concerned with the distribution of grades within various fields, one of which happens to be STEM [1] and doesn't even touch on the question of what attracted the students to study it in the first place. In fact, given that the grades are analysed from the age of six up though University, most of the students won't even have had a say in whether or not they get to study a given subject or not as many will remain compulsory throughout their required schooling.
  
  [1] Since "STEM" is actually a collection of subjects, some that are dominated by one gender or the other and some more balanced, it's also disingenious of them to simply average them out without really getting into the finer details of their methodology as that could (and likely was) also be made to lead the reader's perception of the results. OP's point about what attracts a given student to a given field likely has some relevance to the results as it seems likely that students who opted for a field study of their own volition would have done so because they enjoy it/and or are good at it, both of which might lead to an expectation of higher grades compared to those who picked it through peer/parent pressue or because it is just what their social demographic is expected to do.

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