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from the this-will-not-be-controversial-oh-no-sir dept.
GungnirSniper writes:
"Catherine Rampell at The Washington Post has 'A message to the nation's women: Stop trying to be straight-A students.'
In her analysis of others' findings, she writes of a discouragement gradient that pushes women out of harder college degrees, including economics and other STEM degrees. Men do not seem to have a similar discouragement gradient, so they stay in harder degree programs and ultimately earn more. Data suggests that women might also value high grades more than men do and sort themselves into fields where grading curves are more lenient.
'Maybe women just don't want to get things wrong,' Goldin hypothesized. 'They don't want to walk around being a B-minus student in something. They want to find something they can be an A student in. They want something where the professor will pat them on the back and say "You're doing so well!"'
'Guys,' she added, 'don't seem to give two damns.'
Why are women in college moving away from harder degrees?"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Daniel Dvorkin on Wednesday March 12 2014, @09:45PM
Awfully hard to set up a controlled experiment for this kind of thing. Probably the best you could do would be a prospective study: start with a bunch of freshmen of both sexes and track their grades, their attitudes (as measured by some standardized questionnaire), and their majors throughout their college careers. You could, at the very least, establish temporal relationships this way, which would help with untangling the no doubt complicated relationships of cause and effect.
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