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.

Re: At least the program was a success

[religionofpeas]

Women were demoralized

People who get demoralized by math, probably shouldn't pursue a career in a STEM field. The earlier you can sort out who's interested and who's not, the better. That applies to both men and women equally, by the way.

Re: At least the program was a success

[Baron_Yam]

Yep. On average women have bigger breasts than men. No way could there also be an average difference in the brain. That's unpossible! It's like people who think it's racist to point out there actually are statistical differences between races (primarily skin colour!)... stupidly wrong.

Instead of trying to open the doors for women who want to be in these areas, have the aptitude for them, and may tend to get extra resistance because they're in the minority, it seems there are people who are hell bent on proving women aren't just equal in the philosophical sense, but actually the same. Even then, I'd be OK if they'd just work more on honestly figuring out if and how much of the difference is nature and how much is nurture before insisting there's something wrong if 50% of any given job market is staffed by women.

force them

[frovingslosh]

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? Well, lets just do other things to force them into a field that they will not be good in. Anything but admit that there might actually be valid differences in the sexes.

we tried carrot, next up is stick

[liquid_schwartz]

I guess if we can't convince women to go into the roles that some SJW wants we'll just have to force them. For the greater good of course. This is already being brought up as shown here: http://www.dailytelegraph.com....

No offense but

[nehumanuscrede]

If they broaden that scope a bit, they might note that STEM degrees are in decline overall. ( Unless you're in India )

Due, in no small part, to the current business practice of bringing in H1-B labor for pennies on the dollar. The reasoning being to cut wage costs for everyone who isn't at the executive pay scale. All the while playing the victim card of " We can't find qualified candidates locally " ( Translates to: We don't want to pay domestic market wages for this position )

In this work environment, it wouldn't matter if folks were given access to the most amazing math classes the world has to offer. The folks capable of taking those classes are all too aware of what awaits them in that career field, post education. Debt, with little chance of getting a decent paying job if they have to compete with the H1-B folks.

The smart ones simply choose not to play the game and find another career choice.

Regardless of gender.

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.

Re:Weird

[mbkennel]

> Kids in high school often don't really know what they want to do

For many that's true.

For the ones who are driven to become top level scientists and engineers (and writers!), it is not. How many professional basketball players weren't really that interested in sports in high school?

I went to university with a now famous mathematician---he was doing research on string theory at age 17 with Ed Witten. Now, he's an outlier among outliers, but the point is true.

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.

*sigh*

[sootman]

Can we just accept that different people like different things, and that maybe, just MAYBE, some of these might be related to gender?

I don't keep up on the news for other industries. Are there big pushes elsewhere to get more men into female-dominated professions?

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.

Re:Implications

[yuriklastalov]

Obviously the answer is separating boys and girls in the classroom. Hell, separate schools entirely would probably be even better. That way, we can teach the boys to be the expendable and fungible resources they are, while the girls can be molded into the true and rightful leaders of the world that they were always meant to be before the patriarchy got in the way.

Re:Weird

[Ol Olsoc]

You're incapable of being a ballerina. Women are capable of becoming STEM professionals. This should be obvious, but to a lot of slashdotters, it seems like it is not.

Women most certainly can be just about anything they want to be. And should be if they are so inclined.

But time after time, we find out that they don't want to be what they don't want to be.

And blaming it on men is like looking for your car keys under a streetlamp because the light is good, when you know you lost the keys 50 yards away. People who "know" that males in STEM are violent sexist rapists of greater evil than any other field need to see what happens in the business world.

But as long as we demand gender balance in STEM, the only way we will achieve that is to remove any choice from women, and force them into STEM Otherwise, they are as interested in STEM as they are in hauling garbage.

I've worked with some darn good female engineers and scientists, and the common thread is they wanted to be doing that, and they knew they wanted to be that from a very young age. They also are united in believing the present female recruiting efforts are doomed. Interest in Stem is not something that you can take just anyone and tell them they are interested in it.

What do we do to appease the gender balance people when we finallly admit our failure?