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

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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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @04:46PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @04:46PM (#772411)

    I'm not understanding the articles logic. Some of these statements don't match the data from the study but seem to me to be logically flawed on top of that. Pulling contextual differences out.

    1. However, what was most surprising was that both of these group differences were far larger in A subjects. In B subjects group I and group II received surprisingly similar grades, in both average and variability.
    1. For example, we found that the ability overlap between group I and group II is much greater in B subjects, and smaller in A subjects, meaning that there are fewer of group II competing with group I in A subjects.

    Conclusion: B subjects are not an equal playing field.

    But they just stated the opposite, 'A' subjects were the most unequal playing field. WTF?

    But a bad conclusion might be expected since things like:

    "In STEM subjects girls and boys received surprisingly similar grades, in both average and variability."

    The graph of the data indicates that this is true for average grades, but the variability wasn't similar at all. In fact, variability is the most dissimilar in the STEM fields according to their graph. Are they even looking at their own data?

    "In other words, the researchers demonstrated that academic STEM achievements of boys and girls are very similar – in fact, the analysis suggests that the top 10% of a class contained equal numbers of girls and boys."

    Again, look at their graph. This is true for the average achievement of boys an girls in STEM. It is very similar with girls doing slightly better on average. But the top 10% of the class containing equal numbers?, that doesn't look true at all, unless you have a very tiny class (and they are looking at 1.6 million students). It might be true for the overall numbers of all class types (that looks quite possible on the graphs). But it isn't true of STEM (at least according to their data).

    In fact, go look at the graphs, really. I look at the graphs of the data and my conclusions are very different from the studies. Males, on average, need help. They do worse on average scholastically than females in every subject group. This means that the majority of boys need scholastic support just to try to get to up to the class average. This is especially true in the Non-STEM fields where the average male looks to be at least a standard deviation below the average female. Looking at this data and deciding that women are in trouble is a bazaar and troubling conclusion.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by qzm on Tuesday December 11 2018, @01:38AM

    by qzm (3260) on Tuesday December 11 2018, @01:38AM (#772704)

    The whole study is broken due to selection bias, pretty much by definition..

    These people are taking a big pile of existing data and trying to manipulate/interpret it to fit their agenda, not do actual research.

    It is quite similar to how you will find that male nurses and teachers these days tend to get better results - because they need to be more motivated to
    enter a field dominated by the other gender (in fact you will find a huge bias in both those cases). This does not mean men are better teachers and nurses,
    it simply reflects a strong selection bias because you are not sampling randomly..

    However they achieved what they want - the media, and decision makers will run with it, claiming this is a reason to push more and more funding towards women in STEM.
    Equivalent 'bias' in other areas will be completely ignored of course (the last thing they would want is more women in construction laboring, or god forbid more male teachers)

    Such is the world we live in.