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Study of 1.6 Million Grades Shows Little Gender Difference in Math and Science at School (theconversation.com)
A study of school grades of more than 1.6 million students shows that girls and boys perform similarly in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) subjects. From a report: The research, published today in Nature Communications, also shows that girls do better than boys in non-STEM subjects. Our results provide evidence that large gaps in the representation of women in STEM careers later in life are not due to differences in academic performance. One explanation for gender imbalance in STEM is the "variability hypothesis." This is the idea that gender gaps are much larger at the tails of the distribution -- among the highest and lowest performers -- than in the middle.
There isn't a big financial incentive to go into STEM jobs if you are a college-educated professional. The pay is good, but there is a limit to your professional growth and you have to actually do work and produce results. In reality, sales and marketing at tech companies make as much or more as STEM people. So unless you really enjoy STEM, it is better off avoiding it as a career. I think many women have figured this out.
An answer so obviously true will never be accepted by those seeking a political tool. You'll still find reasonable gender balance in biology classes, though.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
When I taught math or science, the girls were always among the top of the class.
The main reason was that they cared about their grades.
However, they never seemed to enjoy geeking out or talking about things that weren't going to be on the test.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing. Girls would invest in coming to class, taking notes, coming to study and tutoring sessions and really asking for help when they needed it.
Guys weren't as social. Some guys would have problems and not ask for help and do horribly in the end.
Grades are very artificial. They can be gamed since the teacher is giving the grade (it's not a third party assessment). You can get As and not learn much but also get a D and learn a lot.
What really should be looked at is expertise and not grades.
Of course, with every generalization I've made, I remember plenty of exceptions.
Affiliations
Evolution and Ecology Research Centre, School of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2052, NSW, Australia
R. E. O’Dea, M. Lagisz & S. Nakagawa
Research School of Biology, Australian National University, Canberra, 2601, ACT, Australia
R. E. O’Dea & M. D. Jennions
Contributions
S.N. and M.D.J. conceived the study, R.E.O. and M.L. collected data, R.E.O., M.L. and S.N. conducted analyses. All authors contributed to interpretation of the results and writing the manuscript.
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Is there some specific bias that either the University of New South Wales or the Australian National University is known for in these subjects?
I realize that this was intended as sarcasm, but in my kids schools there was a Communication Arts magnet program. They bent over backwards to get enough boys in that program to get somewhat equal numbers of boys and girls. So at least in some areas, there is an attempt to achieve balance by encouraging and supporting boys.
If girls are better at A than boys, but only as good as boys at B, it stands to reason that girls will favor A over B. That's exactly what is happening. Girls go into subjects in which they excel. It frustrates me that no one ever looks at why aren't more men teachers, nurses, social workers, etc. Part of the problem is that not enough women are going into STEM as "we" would like, but the flipside is that not enough men are going into non-STEM. Why don't we try and get more men into non-STEM careers and see what happens?
The study confirms a biological difference despite the misleading summary. They're saying they found no difference in the top 10% in STEM but:
1. Not only the top 10% go into stem. More than 20% of degrees are in STEM fields.
2. They admit that the "grade cap" means that even within the top 10% males might actually be better, but there's no way to know because the math/science scores are capped so that a top-level genius will score only as well as someone who is just very smart.
Furthermore their study confirms greater variability between men than between women which definitely indicates that the grade cap is probably handicapping top end male scores more than top end female scores. More importantly, the fact that girls do significantly better OVERALL in school, but only slightly better in STEM, indicates that the school environment is probably not the best way of determining suitability/ability in a given field. Unless you think that girls really are biologically better than boys at everything. If we assume that, as the feminists would have it, girls and boys are equally capable on average, then the higher performance of girls in school would be attributed to environment, and the fact that they don't do as well in STEM as they do in other subjects would still suggest that boys have an edge in those fields.
Lastly, they mention that the ratios are different in university than in highschool, with women losing a lot of their edge in university. However I don't see a breakdown of university vs high school scores, which seems like a curious omission.
All in all it's an interesting study which doesn't really support the conclusions being drawn here.
Statistics are clearly showing that minorities and women are greatly over represented in college intakes in comparison to their grades.
Schools are picking lower scoring individuals to satisfy some sort of equality metric; those people consistently fail and drop out resulting in a much more natural end result (diversity among those graduating college once again falls in line with the scoring results).
So efforts to get some sort of outcome-driven equality, fail all the time. Nordic communities likewise found that out, they are amongst the highest scoring in actual equality but classic gender and race patterns are emerging stronger than elsewhere.
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"Giving up on helping" is orthagonal to "biological difference". Insisting on equality of outcome (such as perfect gender balance) is tyranny. The goal should be enabling those who want to be a software developer or a nurse or whatever become that without placing gender-based obstacles in their way. Twisting people's arms to make them want to pursue a given field should never be a goal.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
when we are talking about differences between sexes biology is a default explanation
That isn't justified when science is telling us that it's mostly social,
Science never said that. Social "science" says that, and they often say it with next to no evidence.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
No, equality of outcomes is definitely not a measure of equality of opportunity, because preferences are never equal, competing opportunities are never equal, and so on.
Divide up people along any non-arbitrary lines, and you don't expect equality of outcome, even with equality of opportunity, because people in any two non-arbitrary groups won't necessarily have the same values, or the the same pool of unrelated options or anything else that makes people different.
I'm struggling to think of any jobs where the male/female ratio is very close to 50% - I'm sure there is one, just at random, but it's got to be rare. Same with any division of people where you'd expect values to differ.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.