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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @12:22AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @12:22AM (#772659)

    I smell cognitive dissonance. Ignore the whole point fixate on one point of something slightly wrong. This is their brain saying 'ignore everything'. Give it a couple of days and come back.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 12 2018, @03:36AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 12 2018, @03:36AM (#773275)

    I was not interested in discussing anything about the person's post except for the common but erroneous notion that grammatical gender in a language generally corresponds to some concept of the thing described as being "male" or "female." It rarely does.

    If you want to go on about the unrelated topic of women's standing in society, have at it among yourselves.