More Compulsory Math Lessons Do Not Encourage Women To Pursue STEM Careers, Study Finds (phys.org)

An anonymous reader shares a report: The demand for employees in STEM careers (science, technology, engineering and math) is particularly high, as corporations compete to attract skilled professionals in the international market. What is known as "curriculum intensification" is often used around the world to attract more university entrants -- and particularly more women -- to these subjects; that is to say, students have on average more mandatory math courses at a higher level. Scientists from the LEAD Graduate School and Research Network at the University of Tubingen have now studied whether more advanced math lessons at high schools actually encourages women to pursue STEM careers. Their work shows that an increase in advanced math courses during two years before the final school-leaving exams does not automatically create the desired effects. On the contrary: one upper secondary school reform in Germany, where all high school students have to take higher level math courses, has only increased the gender differences regarding their interests in activities related to the STEM fields. The young female students' belief in their own math abilities was lower after the reform than before. The results have now been published in the Journal of Educational Psychology.

Comments

At least the program was a success

[religionofpeas]

The needed more STEM people, and while the number of female students stayed the same, the number of male entries increased, so that's a good result.

Dunning-Kruger effect

[gnasher719]

I think these girls just moved on on the Dunning-Kruger curve.

According to Dunning-Kruger, people who are incompetent believe themselves to be highly competent, because they don't realise how stupid they are. As they become more competent, they realise more of what they don't know and feel they are less competent. Once they are competent, they think that they are probably just average. Only people who are highly competent have the same level of confidence as the total incompetents.

So I think these girls were on the part of the curve where more competence shows you more things you don't know, and makes you feel less competent. It's the move from "how hard can it be" to "this is hard". They need some more lessons to move on to "it's not that hard after all".

That's the real danger

[SuperKendall]

People who get demoralized by math, probably shouldn't pursue a career in a STEM field.

I think this is in fact the real danger of an effort like this - because what you are saying may be conventional wisdom but it is TOTALLY wrong.

The thing is that math is pretty much taught one way across schools and if that way does not agree with you, that says nothing about your ability to be good with various STEM fields or even math for that matter.

I was a late bloomer, as it were, in my relation to math. I didn't really enjoy it pre college, and had trouble with in in college until somehow near the very end it all just clicked and I was fine.

But I was programming, and enjoying programing, long before that point. And even while I was having lots of trouble with basic courses like statistics and calculus, I was getting A/A+ in things like algorithm classes that also required math...

It seems to me that other STEM fields need people who like "traditional" math even less - like biology.

So what an effort to make more math classes mandatory could be doing is actually driving away people from STEM fields who would otherwise like it. It seems more like what should be done is to make a variety of classes that make each STEM field as interesting as possible in order to draw you in to the topic, so that you enjoy the math required to enter the field because now it's not just pure concepts but has some grounding.

Not what happened

[Roger W Moore]

So, if you force people who are not good at math to do more of it, they will eventually figure out that they are not good at it and avoid it?

Actually, bizarrely, that is not what happened. If you RTFA it seems that the extra course decreased the gap in the maths skills between the men and women i.e. the women benefitted from the course more than the men but still ranked lower on average. However it decreased the women's confidence in their maths skills whereas for the men it was unchanged. So paradoxically the course did a great job in better preparing women for STEM careers while simultaneously making them think that they were unsuited for a STEM career.

What is needed now is some psychological study to figure out why women developed such a gap between their actual maths skills and the perceived maths skills while the men did not. If someone could figure out that perhaps we can develop a better way of teaching maths and physics that imparts the required knowledge without the drop in confidence.

most women just are not interested

[paai]

Here is the thing: I have been teaching CS at a dutch university for thirty years. On our university, CS was obligatory, even for humanities students (which I think is a very good thing). About 80% of our students were women. Some of my best students were women, doing PhD trajects with heavy math, computers and statistics. No gender differences there.

But... and this is a big but... most of the female students just could not be bothered. They enrolled at the university because they were intelligent but ALSO wanted an occupation indoors without heavy lifting. And they were not above using their attributes to get a pass. It is not because I am male: my female collegues in the STEM department had the same experience (it is the Netherlands I am talking about - grin).

So all girls out there: stop whining about unequal opportunities. Do your assignments just like the boys. If you don't like maths or CS, just skip it - but don't expect to compete seriously in the world outside, without using your attributes, that is.

I *like* your attributes and they keep the world turning. But it is not maths.

Paai

The SJWs aren't pushing this

[rsilvergun]

a bunch of wealthy capitalists tired of paying $100k/yr for a decent programmer are. Pull your head out of your ass. Not everything you don't like is the fault of SJWs. They're a small, vocal minority. Like religious nuts. The difference is the left ignores their nuts when it comes to policy. This is no different. Getting women into tech isn't a left wing policy. It's a right wing one used to depress wages. Hell, Beth Warren wrote a book on it ("The Two Income Trap"). Go read it sometime. It's great.