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.

Comments

Conclusion highly suspect.

[supercell]

Considering the authors, the funding source and even that they get funding to study gender issues, smells of a biased result.

Girls better in non-STEM

[Roger W Moore]

Boys and girls have both the same abilities. However, boys tend to be more inclined to pursue studies in science.

...or less inclined to follow arts-based courses. This study also shows that girls are better than boys at non-STEM courses by a far more significant margin than the reversed difference in STEM courses at school. So perhaps the deficit in STEM degrees is because more women choose non-STEM degrees where they do have an ability advantage, on average, over men?

Re: Equal abilities

[c6gunner]

That assumes that the variation is biological. How do you exclude social factors?

There's no absolute way to exclude them, that I'm aware of. But that's not really how science works. We don't have to exclude every single possibility before drawing a conclusion, or we would never be able to draw any conclusions at all. As someone pointed out below, when we are talking about differences between sexes biology is a default explanation. If you can exclude biological factors as the explanation, great, then we know they're not at play. This study doesn't do that; rather it reinforces what every other study has found: greater variability in males than in females. You can claim that this doesn't prove that the difference is biological, but given the persistence of these findings across cultures it's a fairly safe bet that biology is a significant factor.

And even if it is biological, does that mean it can't be overcome?

I don't know. I think the better question is whether it's something that we should be trying to overcome in the first place. That's where this stops being a scientific discussion and starts being an ideological one. You seem to think that, if girls are underperforming in some areas, there is a moral imperative to bring them up to par. I disagree. Just like I would disagree that we need to bring boys up to par in areas where they underperform. I'm perfectly fine with having diversity and letting people focus on the things they're actually good at rather than wasting time and money trying to force them to improve at everything else. I see no reason why the sexes need to be identical in every respect, any more than individuals would need to be identical in every respect regardless of sex.

That logic doesn't really work though, because school isn't the only factor in their lives and school isn't one single environment but rather a whole number of different experiences. I remember the atmosphere in some classes being very different to others, for example.

That's true, but it's just another confounding factor in this study which isn't (maybe can't be) ccounted for.