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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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @05:57PM (1 child)
I think I may be misinterpreting what the graphs I was looking at are supposed to indicate. Although, reading the text more thoroughly isn't helping me a whole lot either. I must be one of those below average boys. The one you're looking at are more detailed at least and match what you were saying. Thanks for the clarification!
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Monday December 10 2018, @06:38PM
No problem.
I spend a reasonable amount of time reading this sort of stuff, and I don't always get it right.
If you want to get better at extracting the information from a scientific paper (and sometimes the papers are so bad there isn't any, it is all just smoke-and-mirrors misuse of statistics), then I would recommend starting with reading some of the website articles that pop up if you put 'how to read a scientific paper' (without the quotation marks) into your search engine of choice.
Unfortunately, understanding a lot of good scientific work will require that you have at least a familiarity with the statistical methods used. You can't really avoid it, because without it, incorrect conclusions are easily reached. This doesn't mean you need to have majored in statistics at university, but you should aim to know what the terms used mean.
There is often the problem that the people who produce the publicity material for universities and research institutions don't understand the papers, and put entirely incorrect spins on the. This irritates the researchers greatly, but there isn't a lot they can do about it. So be wary of taking publicity materials at face value.
The social sciences is one area where statistics are often misused, or even abused. Even well regarded highly-cited papers in the field can have fatal flaws. Just like other human endeavours, some people make mistakes through ignorance; others set out deliberately to mislead. Telling the difference between the two can be difficult.
Good luck with your further reading.