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

Equal abilities

[hcs_$reboot]

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

Re:Equal abilities

[lgw]

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.

Re:Equal abilities

[olsmeister]

I was always pretty good at street biology.

Re:Equal abilities

[AmiMoJo]

It's evidently true, all the statistical evidence says that it is true.

The question is why. Most people who study biology, psychology and sociology don't think that it is due to some biological difference.

Re:Equal abilities

[shaitand]

Yes, although grades and academic performance tend to poorly capture ability in many areas of STEM and particularly T. Grades tend to reflect your ability to utilize material you've been taught in the applications in which you've been taught to apply it.

High achievement in technology tends to come from your ability to abstract concepts from other solutions and either build new tools from them and/or apply them in ways you haven't seen them before. Academic success indicates you have lots of tools in your garage so to speak, which doesn't preclude talent but also doesn't always correlate. Personally, I'd rather invest in someone who solved the challenge of making a part to my specifications with a couple custom shaped pieces of wood, a drill, a clamp, and a standard screwdriver than someone who can pass a test by turning out that part with a lathe after being taught a set of techniques in a classroom which were designed to culminate in that test. You know the former has the creativity which sets apart the best and you can always train him on and provide the superior tools from there.

Re:Equal abilities

[Opportunist]

And people in STEM fields do?

Re:Equal abilities

[Anonymous Coward]

many on Slashdot seem to be pretty convinced...

Typical AmiMojo. While nutjobs like Mashiki will pull out conspiracy web sites and links to random blog posts from the Internet as evidnce, AmiMojo tops him by not citing anything but his own experience on how things "seem" to him.

Reminds me of stereotypical Fox News hosts. Or maybe climate change deniers who are like "doesn't seem hot here!"

Re:Equal abilities

[Opportunist]

And you're able to present some sort of indication that either of that assertions are actually the case?

Re:Equal abilities

[lgw]

When there's a difference between the sexes, "biological difference" is the null hypothesis, though it's hard to see how that expresses itself except in personality. There are plenty of psychological differences between men and women as statistical groups (and that's the context here, statistical group tendencies, not individuals). It would be interesting to see if that explains it entirely: measure the Big 5 personality traits of a large sample of e.g. physics grad students or working software developers, and see if the gender imbalance is what you'd expect if the gender differences in those traits was all that was going on, or what the correlation was (how big is "what's left to explain").

Of course, that would leave the question of why the personality traits that are commonly found in those successful in a field are what they are, and if that's necessarily true, or just the current culture. But that question's a bit moot without data.

Re: Equal abilities

[c6gunner]

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.

Re:Equal abilities

[guruevi]

Most people in psychology and biology do accept the fact that people are different and are predisposed to certain directions in life - women tend to be caretakers for example and thus score higher in traits associated with that; men tend to be more aggressive and conscientious thus scoring higher paying jobs.

People in sociology and women’s studies don’t believe the science, but then again, most of the papers in their field are virtually never cited.

Re: Equal abilities

[AmiMoJo]

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.

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

And even if it is biological, does that mean it can't be overcome? There is much debate over how much boys maturing a little later than girls is due to biology or social influences, but in either case adjusting the curriculum and teaching methods a little can negate this difference by the time both genders reach adulthood.

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.

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.

I agree that's it's a very interesting study though.

Re:Equal abilities

[king neckbeard]

but then again, most of the papers in their field are virtually never cited.

Is that really a meaningful metric? It doesn't seem to be specific to that field, and instead is a result of the nature of how citations work. it would be more indicative of a fraudulent circlejerk if most papers were cited.

Re:Equal abilities

[cayenne8]

It might be that these new findings are due to the long term dumbing down of males that we've essentially been undertaking over the past decades.

We've been pushing females so much lately, and ignoring the males and what made them excel in the past, so...these new findings aren't that surprising.

Re:Equal abilities

[mysidia]

Boys and girls have both the same abilities.

That's not been shown by the research.... only that the performance of the people that choose to take the STEM classes are on average: Mean performance basically the same across genders.

As mentioned in the summary: There may be gender-related differences among the tails of the distributions --- those that performed much better or much worse than average, for example the top 10% of performers in STEM courses and the bottom 10% might represent one gender more than the other, and this study would not have been able to rule that out.

Re:Equal abilities

[shaksys]

Same POTENTIAL abilities. However, I find that among my colleagues men will work overnight to meet deadlines but women wont. In a high demand field that requires lots of extra hours, it makes sense that people who work the extra hours are paid more and managers are more likely to hire and keep employees who work extra hours. Want more women in STEM? Make it part time.

Re: Equal abilities

[mysidia]

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.

Yeah... there's a problem there. And the people most likely to successfully go into related STEM field after college may in fact be those whose scores were capped down.
              Just having "average" performance is not necessarily impressive. Many students have to take some STEM classes, but aren't ultimately going to have a STEM career.

Re:Equal abilities

[bob4u2c]

Most test scores only measure the ability for someone to remember the correct answer long enough to get it on paper.

Interest on the other hand determines what field people go into.

For example, I had A+'s in Art, but it never appealed to me. On the other hand I had B's in Math, which did interest me. Guess which career path I took?

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.

Re:Equal abilities

[gweihir]

Directly, no. But indirectly, yes. The thing is that what body you happen to live in does shape your perception of reality. Simply wanting to conform to biological roles will put more men into engineering and more women into medicine (for example). Unless we manage to overcome fundamental biological realities, this will not change.

So in the end, all we can do is to allow people to make their own choices and not put up any artificial barriers. If the numbers are still skewed (and they are), we have to accept that. This is "equal opportunity", not enforced equality and I am perfectly fine with it.

Re:Equal abilities

[lgw]

"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.

Re: Equal abilities

[datavirtue]

The people who did this study are sexist. I didn't need a study.

Re:Equal abilities

[Anonymous Coward]

but many on Slashdot seem to be pretty convinced...

Really? Because it seems to me that many on Slashdot, when they say "women just aren't inclined to go into those fields", they aren't trying to secretly say "women just aren't inclined to go into those fields because they are biologically predisposed not to", they are simply saying "women just aren't inclined to go into those fields". Nothing more, nothing less.

Further more, when they express opposition to trying to get more women into those fields, they aren't opposed to the concept of trying to get more women into those fields, they are opposed to a particular method of trying to force that change that does not bother to try to understand why the difference exists in the first place.

To clarify, I am not saying that everyone saying these things are saying them for those reasons. I am sure there are some misogynists on this site. But they seem to be the minority.

Re: Equal abilities

[AJWM]

Higher variability in males than females (in almost any category) should be expected in anything that might be even partly gene-linked.

Males have only one X-chromosome. Any genetic variation on that will go unchecked, whereas females have a second X-chromosome which can help even out any variations. (Obviously I am oversimplifying genetics, but that's the gist of it.)

Not all factors in academic (or any other) performance are gene-linked, of course, and of those not all are on the X-chromosome. But minor differences tend to show up at the margins. Both good and bad.

But yes, let people - male or female - focus on what they, as individuals, are good at. Don't whack the heads off the tall-standing flowers so they're all the same height.

Re:Equal abilities

[lgw]

Why even assume that, it's bizarre.

Because we seem to be measuring against "equal outcomes" as if that were the goal. That's a particularly shitty goal.

Re: Equal abilities

[c6gunner]

That isn't justified when science is telling us that it's mostly social, with only a tiny and often insignificant part being biological.

That's begging the question. I'm pointing out the problems with these studies and you're just saying "well the science says ..." as if there were no disagreement over their conclusions. What the science actually shows is that both biology and environment play a role. How much each one contributes depends a lot on the society we are looking at, but even if we limit ourselves to just looking at the USA it is still very much an open question.

Re:Equal abilities

[Austerity Empowers]

introverted autistic

Why are you associating these two things? One is a personality type, the other is a mental disorder. Most people in the latter category are incapable of STEM careers.

STEM careers are more introverted than say, teaching elementary school. But they are not the life of isolation that I would prefer to have. I'd probably try to take up writing or something.

Re:Equal abilities

[Darinbob]

In grade school and high school, the top math students were mostly girls. I never even heard of a gender imbalance in math until late in the university (our math and science classes were well balanced, but possibly due to these being prerequisites for everyone). Even when graduating there was good female representation in computer science. When I got my first jobs in computing about a third to one half of programmers and sysadmins were women. Nothing started to feel like a sausage fest until this millenia.

This imbalance in computing seems to be something that happened over time. And believe me, computing was seen as something only for geeks back then and it didn't have the sort of people who today try to pretend its cool.

Re:Equal abilities

[Darinbob]

Further out on the tail doesn't mean much though. In the computing world the vast majority of those being hired are in the average range. And if we go by the average then we should be seeing similar numbers of men and women with the same aptitudes. And you actually do see more gender balance if you go outside of US and Europe.

Re:Equal abilities

[lgw]

Wow, modded to "-1" for agreeing that girls and boys are equal in ability. That's a new low even by /. standards.

Re: Equal abilities

[goose-incarnated]

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.

Re:Equal abilities

[jellomizer]

Or is it that Women are less inclined to pursue studies in science, due to discrimination in the field.
If you are going into a field where you are going to be discriminated against, you either must really love that field, or are strong willed enough to endure the problems.

Now I am going get a lot of comments, stating if they are not tough enough to be in the field then they shouldn't be so. Except for the fact for Math and Science studies, they are suppose to be areas of the smart and not big tough guys fighting each other.

Re:Equal abilities

[HornWumpus]

So you boldly assert without evidence.

Ignoring your own assumption that every group is identical. To make that assumption you throw away all data and go with your beliefs.

Re:Equal abilities

[guruevi]

It is because it means you're producing science that nobody bothers to even build upon. The problem is that sociologists build corporate rules (eg. equality and bias 'training' in HR departments) and laws (eg. in Canada and Europe) surrounding papers that have never been cited and are not logically or scientifically supported.

Re:Equal abilities

[HornWumpus]

Nope.

The stats disagree with you. Girls are good at math until middle school.

Think about how middle school girls and boys behave. The boys are full time taking things apart/building. The girls are full time Machiavellian middle school power players.

Re:Equal abilities

[lgw]

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.

Re: Equal abilities

[Hognoxious]

There is much debate over how much boys maturing a little later than girls is due to biology or social influences

I'm failing to see how social influences could control hormone production.

Re: Equal abilities

[Hognoxious]

That isn't justified when science is telling us that it's mostly social, with only a tiny and often insignificant part being biological.

Is science telling us that?

Re:Equal abilities

[Hognoxious]

Equality of outcomes is usually determined on an individual basis.

Ah, so that explains why I'm exactly equal to me.

Re:Equal abilities

[Darinbob]

In my experience this wasn't true. In my high school most girls did their homework and most guys goofed off.

Re:Equal abilities

[Aighearach]

I was always pretty good at street biology.

Road pizza is an often-overlooked specialty with limited competition, I can see how it might be appealing in this over-degreed academic environment.

Though it might suggest it a reevaluation of the pros and cons of academic work compared to commercial work.

Re: Equal abilities

[Aighearach]

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.

Horseshit. If science can't answer all the questions you can think up, it just means science can't answer all the questions you can think up. The difficulty of answering certain questions using science simply calls into question the attempt to answer them using science; it does not in fact lower the bar of what is science just so that you can have an answer that says "science" next to it.

Maybe most of the reasons people are asking the question are ethical rather than scientific in the first place, and the only role of the studies is to prove again and again that science still can't solve this? Maybe instead the solutions will have to be based on ethics and policy, which are non-scientific but still have measurable objective components?

Re: Equal abilities

[Wulf2k]

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

Re:Equal abilities

[Aighearach]

Insisting on equality of outcome (such as perfect gender balance) is tyranny.

I remember in 1998 I asked a female friend with a high IQ how society should go about creating gender balance in technical jobs like computer programming, and she told me it wasn't a reasonable goal because women have less interest in being toolmakers than men; if they have the same technical education, a lower percentage of the women will want to be toolmakers.

Outcome as measured by STEM scores might be irrelevant to average preferences. And average preferences might also be irrelevant to individual preferences. Leading to a complete wash on that part, in the best case, and a bunch of confused nonsense in every direction in the worst case.

Maybe society should figure out the morals and ethics of how tool makers and tool users share the benefits of those actions first, and then circle back and see if we even still need to worry about the ratio of average preferences vs reproductive bits.

Re:Equal abilities

[Aighearach]

I can haz neckbaerd? I can haz standards?
slashdiot has gurlz?

You totally forgot about the grits, didn't you?

Re:Equal abilities

[Aighearach]

I remember in the 1980s in middle school, there were about an equal number of boys and girls in the advanced math class.

Keyboarding class was close to even.

Computer Applications class was close to even.

Programming was mostly boys.

After school hanging out in the computer lab was mostly boys.

Re:Equal abilities

[AmiMoJo]

Sigh. I said the exact opposite of what you think I said. Equality of outcome is not the same as equality of opportunity, except by coincidence.

As for 50/50 jobs, I see that marketing is there in some places. Doctors in the UK as getting close.

Thing is though, since the ratio of men to women in the workforce isn't equal you wouldn't necessarily expect the numbers in the workplace to be equal either.

Re:Equal abilities

[mcl630]

However boys tend to be more inclined to pursue studies in science.

Is that difference in "inclination" biological or social or both?

Re: Equal abilities

[mrclevesque]

"What the science actually shows is that both biology and environment play a role."

So are you saying science tells us we should do all we can to eliminate the environmental biases?

Re:Equal abilities

[king neckbeard]

My point is that it appears that this is not just true for sociology, but EVERY ACADEMIC FIELD. So, by that metric, you'd be claiming that all scientific fields don't work.

The reality is that like most fields, the 80/20 rule applies, and ~80% of citations are going to come from ~20% of sources. That also means that the remaining 80% are going to only constitute 20% of citations, which means that there is going to be a lot of papers without any citations.

So, while there are many valid criticisms of those fields (I would argue that they are around the level of maturity as chemistry was during the age of alchemy), this says more about your understanding of statistics than whatever Cultural Marxism boogeyman you fear.

Re:Equal abilities

[Darinbob]

We didn't have a computer lab, so I don't know what that would have been like.

Re: Equal abilities

[c6gunner]

So are you saying science tells us we should do all we can to eliminate the environmental biases?

That's a silly conclusion. You could have asked if science tells us that we should do all we can to eliminate the biological factors, and it would have been no less silly.

What you should do depends very much on what your desired outcome is. Science doesn't dictate ideology. It gives you an "is", not an "aught".

I do think we should try to minimize societal inequity whenever possible, but I'm not going to pretend that "science told me that".

Re: Equal abilities

[c6gunner]

Found the women's studies major ...

Re:Equal abilities

[rkordmaa]

Of course the abilities are same, it's not like there is some biological machinery dedicated for solving algebra, STEM problems are purely social constructs and so are any differences in solving them. But the study does in fact suggest girls are doing worse at STEM fields, better title would be "girls school performance degrades to boys level in STEM fields". It's no secret that girls are doing generally better at school than boys, better study discipline, less laziness and fewer instances of goofing off and doing stupid things instead of studying.

Re:Equal abilities

[DNS-and-BIND]

Yes it is a meaningful metric. It's a standard in the field.

Re:Equal abilities

[king neckbeard]

And how does the standard compare in sociology and women's studies to other subfields of academia? Because at least a cursory glance on the subject suggests that citations roughly follow a power law distribution.

Yes, an individual paper getting a lot of citations indicates that the paper is highly valued. But an expectation of every paper being groundbreaking is unreasonable. So, we're going to need more granularity than simply "most," because that applies to academia in general, and the relevant description would probably be more useful in terms of the power instead of percentage.

Other interesting factors might be how those rates change as a field matures, and how an increase in publish-or-perish culture changes the distribution.

Re:Equal abilities

[terrycarlino]

I would say that in my experience, especially at the higher levels being in a STEM field just out right sucks. The hours are long. The appreciation is non-existent. Post-doc level jobs are one step above minimum wage in pay and respect. Science is absolutely about big tough guys fighting each other. Anybody who has ever been in an academic or large scale experiment environment knows that. It's every high level PhD collaborator fighting for their piece of the pie.

So its not about discrimination in the field. Its about a segment of people who want to get into the field without having to face the hurdles everyone else in the field is already facing.

Re: Equal abilities

[quenda]

Found the women's studies major ...

Or an AC making a parody of "gender studies". Unfortunately, parodies are indistinguishable from the real thing.

Re: Equal abilities

[AmiMoJo]

Slashdot, where science is flamebait if it contradicts the narrative.

Re: Equal abilities

[c6gunner]

I think it's shit that your comments are being modded as flamebait. Only one of them actually deserves it; the rest do not. However both your and my comments have been getting modded up and down repeatedly, so you shouldn't feel singled out.

That said, the article you linked to is pretty silly, doesn't really support your claim, and certainly isn't science. I don't think it qualifies as flamebait but it certainly isn't something to be proud of, either.

Re: Equal abilities

[AmiMoJo]

Which one do you think deserves to be modded as flameabit?

The point of that article was that they interviewed the authors of the studies that Damore claimed showed biological differences, and those authors said that while there were some it was not warranted to conclude that they would have the kind of influence Damore (and many Slashdot posters) claim.

Re:Equal abilities

[guruevi]

My point is that current "HR training" is based on science papers that haven't ever been cited. 90% of "white privilege" and "bias" papers have sub-50 citations, none of them are getting even close to 200 citations.

I don't think there are any scientific fields like math or biology where others will base medical or business practices on papers that haven't been cited at least 1000 times which isn't unheard of for papers in fields like neuroscience.

Re: Equal abilities

[c6gunner]

Bringing up Damore in the first place was flamebait. Completely pointless unless you're looking to provoke and derail.

Re: Equal abilities

[mrclevesque]

Fair enough. And well said. Science can't take philosophy out of the equation.

Even if one is thinking generally about biology sociology or psychology, which, for example, find that mental health issues are caused, to a greater proportion, by environmental factors over genetic ones, and even if science can help identify the factors that can effect positive change the most in particular contexts and one assumes that alleviating suffering is a given or that a scientific survey would confirm that to be the case -- that still wouldn't make a decision to act on that information a scientific decision.

Re: Equal abilities

[AmiMoJo]

It's pretty toxic that we can't even talk about the guy, especially when other people are making the exact same mistake he made.

Is that really where we are at now, with topics so offensive and enraging that they have to be completely off limits? We can talk about all sorts of controversial stuff, just not Mr. James Damore?

Well, fuck that, I've got karma to burn.

Re: Equal abilities

[c6gunner]

We can definitely talk about the guy; he just wasn't relevant to the discussion at hand, and the way you brought him up initially was absurd. It came out of nowhere, with no actual connection to what we were talking about, AND you somehow managed to suggest that the court ruling on his case would somehow substitute for actual science. It was ridiculous and very flamebaity, which is why I didn't respond to it.

The link you provided in this branch of the discussion was not flamebait because it was actually relevant, even if the quality of the article was crap. I can chock that up as an honest but misguided attempt. Your other comment ... not so much.

Re: Equal abilities

[AmiMoJo]

As I already pointed out, he is relevant because he made the same argument with the same pseudo-scientific explanation and so the rebuttal of that is relevant. While court cases are of course not a substitute for science, the court will examine the science and decide if Damore's interpretation is reasonable.

Anyway, I dispute your claim. We can't talk about him, even on stories about him anything suggesting that he might be wrong is modded as flamebait.

Re: Equal abilities

[c6gunner]

he made the same argument

No, he didn't, but even if he had it would be irrelevant. It's as if we were talking about vegetarianism and you said "yeah, well, Hitler was a vegetarian too". Well, no, he probably wasn't, but even if he had been it has nothing to do with the discussion, and you are definitely inviting a flame war.

with the same pseudo-scientific explanation and so the rebuttal of that is relevant.

Your idea of rebutting Damore is cherry-picking random articles which talk about scientists mildly criticizing his interpretation of the data while ignoring all the scientists who say "yeah, he pretty much got it right". You then do a little victory dance, congratulate yourself on having proven that he's horrible, and then marvel at the fact that others scoff at you.

No matter how many times you insist that this is a rebuttal, it is not. The scientists quoted in your article aren't nearly as dismissive of him as you are. The fact of the matter is that most of what he wrote was scientifically based and quite reasonable. He may have overreached in a few areas but whatever mistakes he may have made were honest ones, and they pale in comparison to the kinds of broad unwarranted generalizations which you make on a regular basis. Nobody is going to take your demonization of the man seriously as long as you keep demonstrating that you are far less reasonable and nuanced than he was.

While court cases are of course not a substitute for science, the court will examine the science and decide if Damore's interpretation is reasonable.

Wonderful. A modern Scopes Trial. That ought to put the nail in the coffin! No more evolution for anyone.

Anyway, I dispute your claim. We can't talk about him, even on stories about him anything suggesting that he might be wrong is modded as flamebait.

Nonsense. You repeatedly "debunking" him with the same cherry picked articles might get modded as flamebait. It probably shouldn't, but there's no "-1 Repetitive And Annoying" so the mods go with that they have.

If you want to have a reasonable discussion about the guy that's certainly possible, but you have to actually be reasonable first. You have to be willing to acknowledge the scientific support he has recieved, AND you have to stop overselling the scientific criticism being put forward against him.

You should also probably stop injecting him into conversations in which he doesn't belong.

Re:Equal abilities

[DNS-and-BIND]

It's the replication crisis. The papers aren't being cited because they're not reproducible science. The humanities, especially sociology and women's studies, is full of it.

Re: Equal abilities

[AmiMoJo]

You think that citing the authors of the studies he cites as his evidence is cherry picking?

Re: Equal abilities

[AmiMoJo]

I read the article, none of them agree with his conclusions. That's what it says.

Re: Equal abilities

[Hognoxious]

they interviewed the authors of the studies that Damore claimed showed biological differences, and those authors said that while there were some it was not warranted to conclude that they would have the kind of influence Damore (and many Slashdot posters) claim

If they'd said otherwise they'd have been figuratively - and possibly literally - hung, drawn and quartered.

Re: Equal abilities

[Hognoxious]

Wired, LOL. Has about as much science as GQ and that one with the office pest cartoon.

Re: Equal abilities

[AmiMoJo]

Wow, even science is controlled by the Illuminati, I mean SJW conspiracy!

STEM jobs

[110010001000]

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.

Re:STEM jobs

[olsmeister]

If you want to start your own company someday, being an engineer is probably a better career choice than being in sales.

Re:STEM jobs

[110010001000]

Even if that were true, the vast majority of people do not start their own companies.

Re:STEM jobs

[MightyYar]

If you work in tech or manufacturing, a lot of marketing and sales executives - and for that matter, managers - are former engineers.

There is some selection bias here for me, but when I lived in NYC I was shocked by how many people involved with trading were former engineers, physicists, etc. Finding signal in noise, trends in data, ability to logically think through problems, understanding human weaknesses in data analysis, etc are all great skills to have.

Re:STEM jobs

[Ranbot]

If you want to start your own company someday, being an engineer is probably a better career choice than being in sales.

Being engineer is a good start to a career, but if you want to start your own company one day you'll need to sell your product, service, or idea to someone. i.e. sales and marketing.

Re:STEM jobs

[110010001000]

Define "a lot". "A lot" are not. Most marketing and sales executives are not former engineers.

Re:STEM jobs

[AlanBDee]

In reality, sales and marketing at tech companies make as much or more as STEM people.

But these are not the same fields and attract very different personalities. I would rather shovel sludge in sewers then work in sales or marketing. Not that I have anything against those fields; but cold calling or schmoozing people to me is not something I enjoy.

However, I will make the argument that for a larger proportion of women the opposite is true. Thus it has more to do with what you enjoy and less to do with how much you get paid. I also believe this is one of the big contributing factors to why women, on average, make less then men for the same job; they tend to care more about the job and what they're doing then the actual pay while men are quicker to focus on the pay. (just my opinion)

Re:STEM jobs

[110010001000]

This is exactly right. I was stunned to find out that a midlevel-marketing executive at Cisco I know was earning $230k + stock options + bonus. And that was mid level. And it was MARKETING. So unless you really enjoy STEM you are better off switching. That is why there are a lot of women in Marketing as well. Women aren't stupid.

Re:STEM jobs

[110010001000]

"I would rather shovel sludge in sewers then work in sales or marketing"

Great. So go do it. The point is that rational people would rather work in sales or marketing than shovel sludge.

Re:STEM jobs

[Registered Coward v2]

If you want to start your own company someday, being an engineer is probably a better career choice than being in sales.

I would say it depends on what you are selling. The greatest product in the world is useless unless you can sell it. Engineers can get too enamored with the engineering and forget that the end goal is to make something people will buy and makes the company a profit. Anyone can start a company but to be successful at it you need many different talents.

Re:STEM jobs

[Kjella]

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.

With all due respect, it's overwhelmingly women who become primary school teachers and nurses which are two of the absolutely most dead-end and poorly paying careers relative to their education level. So while I could say a lot about sales and marketing, I don't think women shy away from STEM because they generally make "smarter" choices. And by the way if it was that easy, why is it that most tech people are terrible at sales? I mean even in job interviews some people struggle to give even a fair impression of themselves, much less a good one. Maybe being a smooth talker is a form of skill...

Re:STEM jobs

[Opportunist]

Welcome to capitalism. I'm fairly sure I'd be more useful developing secure applications. But there's simply more money in trashing insecure ones, so that's what I do.

Re:STEM jobs

[MightyYar]

Enough that it appears to be a viable path.

Re:STEM jobs

[110010001000]

Women choose primary school teaching because of the flexibility in the hours and summers off. It is one of the more family friendly careers that a woman can get. And there is a nursing shortage. Women do make smart choices.

Re:STEM jobs

[Wycliffe]

The key is to become an asset not an expense. Salespeople generate sales so they pay their own salaries. The only way to do this in STEM is to work for a firm where they bill you out per hour. Even this is somewhat self defeating though because the other side still sees you as an expense so they want to keep your hourly rate low.

Re:STEM jobs

[110010001000]

There are many viable paths for an engineer. That isn't the point. The point is it better to go directly into non-STEM if you want a career.

Re:STEM jobs

[MightyYar]

To some extent, making sure there are liquid markets is an important function. There are extremes at play which benefit no one except the players - such as high-frequency trading. Still, those people are playing by the rules, and it is the rules which need to be tweaked. People won't stop being people.

Re:STEM jobs

[Wycliffe]

Great. So go do it. The point is that rational people would rather work in sales or marketing than shovel sludge.

Luckily there are a lot of different types of people in the world or we would be in trouble. I have a coworker that quit an office job to go back to pouring concrete because he hated being inside all the time. The show Dirty Jobs is full of millionaires who do essential work to keep the world running, it just happens to be gross at times. Related to the topic at hand, there are very few women on Dirty Jobs. Men are more inclined to fill a need and do a dirty job than women and they get paid well for doing it.

Re:STEM jobs

[Wycliffe]

With all due respect, it's overwhelmingly women who become primary school teachers and nurses which are two of the absolutely most dead-end and poorly paying careers relative to their education level.

Teaching yes but not nursing. Nursing is a fairly highly paid job that only requires 2 years of school. My ex-wife had a bachelors in english and went back for an associates(RN) in nursing because nursing pays much better than almost any job you can get with a english degree.

Re:STEM jobs

[shaitand]

If only this were the case at every org but it isn't.

Re:STEM jobs

[110010001000]

There is nothing wrong with that. A lot of people prefer manual labor and working outside of an office. My point is rational people would rather work in sales or marketing than shovel sludge. Obviously you don't know what "paid well" means if you think a guy pouring concrete is getting paid well.

Re:STEM jobs

[MightyYar]

It's only "better" if you don't think it's better to come out of school doing something productive for ~$60-80k/year while your non-engineer friends are "paying their dues". Sure, your 15-year outcomes may be the same, but in the interim you actually had an income and did some interesting stuff.

If you are only becoming an engineer for the money, then yeah, run away. You might as well do engineering for the chicks :)

Re:STEM jobs

[110010001000]

Exactly my point. Don't become an engineer for the money, do it because you love STEM. I think you just figured it out.

Re:STEM jobs

[MightyYar]

If by "just" you mean 20 years ago :)

Re:STEM jobs

[misexistentialist]

primary school teachers and nurses which are two of the absolutely most dead-end and poorly paying careers relative to their education level

more like the opposite, if you measure "education level" by competence, though it's true pay is less generous in areas where taxpayers have less to steal

Re:STEM jobs

[anegg]

The key is to become an asset not an expense. Salespeople generate sales so they pay their own salaries. The only way to do this in STEM is to work for a firm where they bill you out per hour. Even this is somewhat self defeating though because the other side still sees you as an expense so they want to keep your hourly rate low.

I spent many years working for a government contractor in a variety of roles (both internal infrastructure and external billable resource). You may get slightly more pay as a billable resource, especially when the rate at which the company can bill you out is directly tied to what you are paid (true on some government contracts, not necessarily true on commercial contracts). However, the ones who are really making $$ are the people who "win" contracts; they are seen as bringing home the bacon. Oddly enough, the ones who actually do the work that results in a successful outcome of a contract aren't seen as bringing home the bacon. They can even be blamed for a failed outcome that should be more correctly attributed to bad estimates on the part of the folks who "won" the work.

Re:STEM jobs

[AlanBDee]

You're missing the point. I'm saying that it's totally rational for someone to choose to shovel sludge rather then work in sales or marketing. People are different and not all people are motivated by money. Here, watch this TED talk by Mike Rowe about Dirty Jobs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:STEM jobs

[cyberchondriac]

What are salespeople supposed to sell without the engineers designing and building product in the first place? They pay their own salaries as well; they form the core of the company; the salespeople are the interface to the public.

Re:STEM jobs

[lgw]

The point is that rational people would rather work in sales or marketing than shovel sludge.

Rational people can have a variety of values. Valuing only financial success to the exclusion of all else is a mental illness. Sane rational people will make choices to maximize their results according to their personal value hierarchy, whatever that may be. Valuing "not being a weasel" is not evidence of irrationality.

Re:STEM jobs

[lgw]

RN is a highly paid, highly skilled job. More in-demand than doctors in some fields.

But "nursing" includes a lot of low-skilled jobs as well. From what I understand, there are more men to be found in the lower-skilled tiers of nursing. LVN/LPN etc.

Re:STEM jobs

[the agent man]

low pay for teaching is mostly a US phenomenon. There are many countries where teachers, including elementary school teachers, are earning quite well.

Re:STEM jobs

[Darinbob]

Most CEOs I've worked with started in sales. The few that started in engineering often struggled because their primary job as CEO is not to do engineering. If your talking startups then maybe you're right, but that's a weird and distorted world that doesn't reflect the average company.

Re:STEM jobs

[Trailer Trash]

low pay for teaching is mostly a US phenomenon. There are many countries where teachers, including elementary school teachers, are earning quite well.

Low pay for teaching is mostly a fantasy in the US. There are some places where teachers make less, but in general they do quite well. It came out during the crap in Wisconsin a few years ago that teachers there were topping out around $125K in annual compensation (inclusive of insurance and benefits). A two teacher household there would qualify as "rich" to most Democrats.

Re:STEM jobs

[commodore64_love]

> sales and marketing

I cannot watch movies or listen to audiobooks with those 2 careers. As an engineer, I can.

> I think many women have figured this out.

I read one time that most women choose careers they LIKE and enjoy (such as healthcare), whereas most men choose careers they don't really like, but they know the higher pay will support a wife + kids.

Apparently the theory still exists: https://www.theatlantic.com/ed...

Re:STEM jobs

[commodore64_love]

> I would rather shovel sludge in sewers then work in sales or marketing.

Huh. I worked sales at JCpenney for 10 years. I worked in a clean, air conditioned environment, and met tons of beautiful young ladies.

I would definitely not trade that for shoveling sludge.

Re:STEM jobs

[commodore64_love]

> $125K in annual compensation (inclusive of insurance and benefits)

That's a bit misleading. If I included benefits into my engineer salary, I could claim $200,000 a year.... which goes back to the main point: Teachers are underpaid (75,000 less) compared to other professions with Bachelor degrees.

Re:STEM jobs

[HornWumpus]

Sales runs all businesses that sell commodity products...like CPUs.

Don't work for those businesses, unless you like being 'overhead'.

Stay awake, all products become commodity eventually. Don't be surprised when the new CEO is a sales weasel.

Re:STEM jobs

[HornWumpus]

Better they waste their lives chasing money than waste their lives playing party politics.

Re:STEM jobs

[HornWumpus]

Not remotely true for anything like a commodity product.

The IT people at an insurance company are building NOTHING important. Janitors. Avoid.

Re:STEM jobs

[HornWumpus]

Takes GPs words with a grain of sale. RN is a four year program, unless someone is already a lower level nurse.

Re:STEM jobs

[Darinbob]

sales involve specialized products also, like medical equipment that sell maybe 1000 a year. The CEOs job is not to design or build things, but to sell the company to the investors, keep the board happy, and schmooze with other CEOs.

Re:STEM jobs

[HornWumpus]

Sales does not run those companies. Until their product becomes functionally identical to the competition's.

At public companies, the CEO's job is to sell the stock, sometimes he sells it by shipping better products, sometimes he sells it with a reality distortion field.

Re:STEM jobs

[Hognoxious]

"I would rather shovel sludge in sewers then work in sales or marketing"

Great. So go do it.

You mean go do them. Because apparently he's going to both sequentially.

I'd do them in the other order, personally.

Re:STEM jobs

[tkotz]

If starting your own company someday is your measure of success, and you don't care what you do, you should probably go into food services.

Re:STEM jobs

[_Sharp'r_]

Education majors are generally (varies based on State) way overpaid compared to other fields with comparable human capital inputs (similar IQ/test scores, which are the lowest of any major). "Home Economics" is a comparable major to most of the education ones.

Also, don't fall into the trap many people do of comparing a 9 month teacher salary with a 12 month job in other fields. Teachers can and do either take on additional paid teaching (summer school, etc...) for the other 3 months, or else work another part time job (forestry, for example) or run a small business during the summer.

Bottom line, education and social work majors tend to make the least compared to other majors because they are the dumbest, as measured on things like the SAT and GRE. They are also really, really easy majors.

Re:STEM jobs

[serviscope_minor]

With all due respect, it's overwhelmingly women who become primary school teachers

So? That's a very recent phenomenon which is as good as proof as you'll get that it's entirely social factors.

Re:STEM jobs

[MooseTick]

"That's a bit misleading. If I included benefits into my engineer salary, I could claim $200,000 a year.... which goes back to the main point: Teachers are underpaid (75,000 less) compared to other professions with Bachelor degrees."

Bachelor degrees are not all made equal. Someone with a History degrees will likely make a lot less. I'd say getting an engineering degree may be the most difficult to obtain. Therefore, that's why they pay the most. Also, most teachers have ~180 school days and ~10 in-service days/year while most other professional workers work ~250 days/year. If those $75k teachers worked 250 days/year, that would equate to ~$94k.

I've known teachers who complain about money issues and I have suggested they work over the Summer and they act like that is crazy talk. Sure, their job is important, but so is the guy designing/building that bridge you drive over every day.

Re:STEM jobs

[cryptizard]

Don't fall into the trap of thinking that teachers have 3 months off in the summer. Most places go well into June (here the last day this year was the 19th) and teachers have to be back in the middle of August.

Re:STEM jobs

[cryptizard]

Also, if you work an engineering job you likely get at least 4 weeks paid vacation, possibly 6 or 8 weeks. Teachers can't take time off in the middle of the year, the summer break is their equivalent of vacation time.

Re:STEM jobs

[cryptizard]

Except that professional workers get 20-30 days of paid vacation time while teachers get none.

Re:STEM jobs

[Trailer Trash]

Except that professional workers get 20-30 days of paid vacation time while teachers get none.

Wow. Is this meant as a joke? Most teachers get 1-2 months off every summer. When I was a kid, some of my teachers took on another job during that time. My math teacher had a truck-washing business during the summer.

The summers are a bit shorter now, but down here teachers get a full two months.

Re:STEM jobs

[Trailer Trash]

Why? Because teachers should make as much as engineers? That doesn't make sense.

Re:STEM jobs

[MooseTick]

"Except that professional workers get 20-30 days of paid vacation time while teachers get none."

Most professionals get paid weekly over the course of the entire year averaging out the times they work or not. Most teachers are given that option as well. Some choose that, and others choose to get paid the 9-10 months they are actively working.

Also, most people in the US get 10 vacation days/year until they are at the same workplace for 10+ years yet this site states the "median number of years that wage and salary workers have worked for their current employer is currently 4.6 years" (https://www.thebalancecareers.com/how-long-should-an-employee-stay-at-a-job-2059796). Hence, most professionals never see "paid" vacation time beyond 10 days.

Re:STEM jobs

[cryptizard]

But they are not paid during that time, it is unpaid vacation vs paid vacation that most people get.

Re:STEM jobs

[cryptizard]

Not sure where you get the 10 number from. The largest US employer, the federal government, gives 13 days for 3 years or less of employment, 20 days after that and 26 days at 15 years.

Re:STEM jobs

[Wycliffe]

If you Google "teacher salary by country", the first link is to an OECD study. The USA ranks 5th highest in teacher income.

The OECD says top of pay scale in the USA for school teachers is $68k. That sounds about right. In order to get that a teacher needs to have a Master's Degree and likely also needs to teach summer school (i.e. all 12 months). Compare that to other occupations with 6+ years of post high school training. They aren't the worst paying job but almost all the teachers I know have a spouse that makes considerably more than they do. Try to find another occupation where everyone in that occupation makes less than their spouse. Especially today, most people tend to marry people in the same sociaeconomic and intellectual class as they are. My guess is a majority of teachers could easily find a better paying job if they left teaching.

Re:STEM jobs

[_Sharp'r_]

Teachers generally actually do get paid days off they can take in the middle of the school year. That's why we have substitute teachers.
A quick google shows a detailed comparison summarized as:
Annual work days if all leave taken for an average teacher: 171.5
Annual work days if all leave taken for an average other 10-year employee: 220

Re:STEM jobs

[_Sharp'r_]

See other link. It's closer to 10 weeks on average.

Re:STEM jobs

[MooseTick]

I'm aware. I used to be a federal employee. Most US companies start people out with 2 week, then after 5 years go to 3 week, and after 10 years offer 4 weeks vacation. I've also worked at several other large companies (over 10k employees) and this seems to be pretty standard. These sites back that up with stats from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics-

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/0...
https://www.usatoday.com/story...

The actual numbers are actually a little lower according to this - https://www.bls.gov/news.relea...

So, when are we going to do somethign about this?

[gerald.edward.butler]

>> also shows that girls do better than boys in non-STEM subjects.

So, we need to have a massive influx of cash, capital, action to ensure that boys catch up to girls in non-STEM subjects. Boys go to and graduate from college less frequently than girls. There needs to be massive encouragement and support for boys to attend college. Something must be done. It is unconscionable that boys are being left behind like this. There seems to be a massive, systematic, institutional prejudice against boys that is causing them to fail. Something must be done. Boys are 50% of the population, but, they are not 50% of College graduates. Something must be done. There should be scholarships and camps and meetings and web-sites and discussion forums and bridge groups. This is absolutely unfair and shows a great prejudice and discrimination against boys and maleness.

Re:Have Mercy!

[AmiMoJo]

According to this, the only area that men can compete with women is in STEM. In all other fields, women are markedly superior to men.

No, that's not what it is saying.

Academic performance is not a measure of raw, innate ability or intelligence. It depends greatly on many, many factors. Quality of teaching, availability of resources, diet, all sorts of stuff.

Under-performance of boys is mostly thought to be due to social factors. The same reasons that girls used to do significantly worse in maths, but with some effort the gap was closed. Now effort is re-focusing on helping boys reach the same level.

Re:Have Mercy!

[lgw]

Maybe something like those grinders that they throw male chicks into.

Wow, that's taking TERFs to a whole new extreme.

Re:Have Mercy!

[110010001000]

Women already earn more University degrees than men, including Associates, Baccalaureate and advanced degrees. And that imbalance has been increasing yearly. Men are in big danger of being left behind.

Re:Have Mercy!

[Lucas123]

"In all other fields, women are markedly superior to men"

From the study:

"The simulated distributions of girls’ and boys’ grades show the distributions of grades overlap more in STEM (94.2%) than non-STEM (88.2%) subjects. For example, within the top 10% of the distribution the gender ratio is even for STEM, and slightly female-skewed for non-STEM (language, humanities, social science). One possible explanation is that boys’ are more affected by the ceiling affect in STEM than non-STEM. For example, if a grading scale cannot distinguish between students in the top 1% or top 0.1%, and if there exists a male skew in the top 0.1% only in STEM but non in non-STEM, then gender differences in variance would be underestimated in STEM.

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.

Re:Conclusion highly suspect.

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Brace yourselves...

[110010001000]

So women don't get STEM jobs because their applications get discarded because they are female? What are you saying? Just come out and say what you think, you know you want to.

Re:Have Mercy!

[Ol Olsoc]

According to this, the only area that men can compete with women is in STEM. In all other fields, women are markedly superior to men.

No, that's not what it is saying.

sigh...Whoosh

Re:Have Mercy!

[MightyYar]

Just playing devil's advocate here...

I've heard it argued that because education was female-dominated for so long, educational conditions and methods are actually skewed to favor females.

Re:Have Mercy!

[Ol Olsoc]

Maybe something like those grinders that they throw male chicks into.

Wow, that's taking TERFs to a whole new extreme.

It's a brave new world, and we must insure stability until selective breeding turns future men into little parasitical sperm releasing dildos.......

Re: Have Mercy!

[Anonymous Coward]

Raw imare intelligence is not an indicator of how someone will do okay school or life. I know a couple truely brilliant people who donâ(TM)t do shit because they are lazy as hell.

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:Girls better in non-STEM

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really, girls are more concerned with social acceptance and avoiding shame than boys are. It's one of the reasons why you don't have as many girls being diagnosed with ASD, they'll spend huge amounts of time and energy camouflaging the symptoms and rehearsing so that people don't find out.

You're much less likely to have a female student take risks that could result in losing face in order to gain an understanding beyond what the teacher is demanding from the students.

Also, keep in mind that the schools have been cutting things like music, sports and free time that boys tend to need in order to function properly at school while simultaneously punishing boys that act out or have to release their pent up energy.

You also have around 90% of the teachers being female teachers and using techniques that may not be valid when dealing with boys. Despite what the far left will have you believe, boys are not girls and girls are not boys. Boys are also not broken girls, they have different characteristics that need to be taken into account when designing schools and classes for them. Having boys running around with no male role models at all isn't a recipe for success in any area of endeavor.

And yet, we expect boys to essentially raise themselves, figure out masculinity all while avoiding doing anything that would result in being sent to prison. Not easy, especially in America where we have a for profit prison system that needs bodies to fill cells.

Re:Girls better in non-STEM

[AmiMoJo]

But do you believe that women really do have an innate advantage in non-STEM subjects?

And why are there certain very specific exceptions to this rule? The classic example is the difference between nurses and doctors.

Re:Girls better in non-STEM

[Nite_Hawk]

There is supporting evidence for your hypothesis:

http://journals.sagepub.com/do...

I think the explanation that high-achieving women tend to be proficient in both verbal and math abilities while men are more likely to be proficient primarily in math abilities is pretty compelling. It's possible that preference is the primary driver, but I'm not sure you can really separate preference and ability so cleanly.

Look at the gender breakdown of medical specialties here:

https://wire.ama-assn.org/educ...

Notice how men tend to gravitate toward roles that involve less human interaction? Surgery, Anesthesiology, Radiology. There's no shame in admitting that women might be simultaneously as good as men at Math, but better, or at least more likely to enjoy, roles that require high levels of verbal aptitude as well.

Re:Girls better in non-STEM

[edtice1559]

It's one of the reasons why you don't have as many girls being diagnosed with ASD, they'll spend huge amounts of time and energy camouflaging the symptoms and rehearsing so that people don't find out.

I don't usually reply to ACs but thought it was better than down modding. The defining characteristic of ASD is not caring about these things at all. So this doesn't really make any sense.

Re:Girls better in non-STEM

[lgw]

"Subjects" or "fields"? Women will have a large career advantage over men at teaching young children, regardless of ability, because the men are assumed to be pedophiles. People have a preference for fields they are likely to succeed in, which is separate from ability in a subject.

That's kind of the point of a lot of the "OMG gender!" stuff going on, right? Accusations that some fields are unwelcoming to women, regardless of ability?

There are no doubt biological differences in ability. There are no doubt biological differences in preference. There are no doubt social differences in preference, both generally and in the culture of specific fields. The interesting question is "how large is each", as only the last is really something we can affect.

Re:Girls better in non-STEM

[Darinbob]

Well, if women have multiple sets of skills it may mean that they have more opportunity to avoid the grungy world of IT tech support.

But there is a cultural factor here. When you look at immigrant workers in the US, women are much more represented in computing than with native born workers.

Re:Girls better in non-STEM

[Anonymous Coward]

this is because most men ARE pedophiles. You are a pedophile regardless of whether you want to admit it.

Re:Girls better in non-STEM

[Roger W Moore]

But do you believe that women really do have an innate advantage in non-STEM subjects?

I honestly have no real idea. However, the data in the study suggest that this is might be the case because they found the largest gender gaps in non-STEM fields such as English where girls scored an average grade of 7.8% above boys. I suppose that an alternative explanation might be discrimination against men in non-STEM fields but this seems rather unlikely. So, assuming the data give an accurate representation of what is happening the most plausible explanation in my view is that women do have an advantage in these fields either through innate ability or more interest and motivation compared to men.

Re:Girls better in non-STEM

[Anonymous Coward]

I think to excel in STEM you have to spend an insane amount of time alone cracking on keyboards or devising theorems or what ever the task is. So it becomes 2nd nature. Now, since the STEM boys are alone anyway...

Re:Girls better in non-STEM

[Aighearach]

But do you believe that women really do have an innate advantage in non-STEM subjects?

And why are there certain very specific exceptions to this rule? The classic example is the difference between nurses and doctors.

Simple, the subjects in the study are things like Math and English. As is widely known, boys are encouraged to play more athletically than girls, and girls are more likely to be encouraged to play quietly, in a small area, ideally while sitting in a chair. So if they have more than 2 brain cells, they spend an increased time reading, and they therefore have an increased personal value placed on writing.

Boys are given enhanced encouragement for being good at math, but they're also given enhanced encouragement for not sitting still too much. Compared to reading, where boys are not given enhanced encouragement for being good at reading, OR for sitting still. So it makes perfect sense that the irrational inputs counteract each other on one subject, but not all subjects.

Girls are also more likely to be given encouragement for aesthetically appealing chirography, which would naturally enhance their individual value for what others think of their writing, also leading to enhanced scores.

If you had two groups of children of the same gender, and you treated the groups in these different ways, you'd expect very similar outcomes just from that. Both in preferences, and average abilities.

Re:Girls better in non-STEM

[AmiMoJo]

You are right, but prepare to be punished for not towing the biological essentialism line.

Re:Girls better in non-STEM

[AmiMoJo]

You don't think there are problems for men wanting to become nurses or childcare specialists? And those are just the tip of the iceberg.

Re:Girls better in non-STEM

[Aighearach]

You are right, but prepare to be punished for not towing the biological essentialism line.

Not likely.

* Married, so don't care about social "consequences" unless my wife does. And she doesn't.
* I live in a State where the Constitution demands us to implement our equal rights by not discriminating at all in the workplace based on sex or a long list of other things. We're supposed to try to live the goal and treat people as unique individuals. People who believe in biological essentialism are risking real punishment if they also act based on those beliefs.
* People support biological essentialism because they don't understand that the tails are symmetrical, and that basal populations contain the highest performing outliers, not the specialist populations. If people understood even just that detail, and internalized it, they would no longer even have the emotional desire for essentialism to be correct.

Re:Girls better in non-STEM

[Anonymous Coward]

Girls are better at most things, and almost as good at sports; for a brief period when they have hit puberty and the boys haven't. The article doesn't mention the age, so I assume it's probably has 11-13 year olds; prime age for this data twist.

Re:Girls better in non-STEM

[CrimsonAvenger]

You are right, but prepare to be punished for not towing the biological essentialism line.

Toeing. The line, in that phrase, does not refer to pulling things, but to standing at the right place in a formation (with your toes on the line drawn on the ground)....

Re:Have Mercy!

[b0s0z0ku]

My (public) high school math and science teachers were mostly (about 3:4) male.

Grades do not reflect expertise

[m00sh]

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.

Re:Grades do not reflect expertise

[Opportunist]

As soon as you give people a metric they're judged by, they optimize for that metric rather than do quality work.
--Eva Infeld, mathematician

In other words, girls are better at gaming the system.

Re:Grades do not reflect expertise

[religionofpeas]

However, they never seemed to enjoy geeking out or talking about things that weren't going to be on the test.

To see a clear demonstration, check out youtube videos on electronics/metal/woodworking vs videos on arts & crafts. There's a clear gender division, even though there's an extremely low barrier to stream a hobby video.

Re:Grades do not reflect expertise

[Guybrush_T]

Totally agree with what I've experienced. Girls were more scholar and favoured learning over understanding (compared to boys). Maybe indeed because they were just trying to be good students, not really enjoying the field of study.

That holds pretty well until it doesn't. At some point in my math studies, I really saw an inversion where all the top spots became taken by boys.

Of course, just my experience.

Re:So, when are we going to do somethign about thi

[AmiMoJo]

Well, yes, something should be done. After all we care about helping every child to fulfil their potential, right?

And yes, it is massive, systemic and institutional. Breaking down the barriers that boys face is the way to solve it.

Some of it is even discrimination. I've heard of boys being told that cooking and even book clubs are not for them, due to toxic ideas of what masculinity is and apparently the teacher wanting the club to be girls only.

Remarkably insightful post.

Re:So, when are we going to do somethign about thi

[b0bby]

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.

Re:Have Mercy!

[Ol Olsoc]

According to this, the only area that men can compete with women is in STEM. In all other fields, women are markedly superior to men.

Looks like as women take over in STEM as well, we'll need to have a massive culling of males.

Maybe something like those grinders that they throw male chicks into.

Why so drastic? I think a lifetime on a treadmill with periodic influx of nutrients and electrical stimulation of the vital organs will be sufficient. Why waste the male drone potential?

Captcha: jerking

Not bad, not bad at all. I do like differential solutions to the male problem.

Re:Have Mercy!

[AmiMoJo]

We both thought you were being sarcastic, but unfortunately it's the kind of sarcasm you get from people who just refuse to accept any of this and Poe's law took over.

Re:Have Mercy!

[MightyYar]

I also have personal experiences which differ from national averages.

From the AAE

According to the most recent population survey released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor, the teaching gender gap is still alive and well. Male educators constitute just 2.3% of pre-K and kindergarten teachers, 18.3% of the elementary and middle school teacher population, and 42% of the high school level teaching staff. These numbers are down from 2007, but suggest a clear female majority in the teaching profession, especially in the earlier grades.

Exactly! Re:Girls better in non-STEM

[PackMan97]

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?

Re: Exactly! Re:Girls better in non-STEM

[peragrin]

Why get frustrated? Men tend to view male teachers nurse etc as weak(even though it is a lie) and so stay away from those fields.

Male nurses tend to even get paid more as they have the muscles to move some of the overweight patients around easier.

Re:Exactly! Re:Girls better in non-STEM

[Darinbob]

That's not really what the study says. The differences are not found in the averages but at the tails of the bell curve. Since most people are average then the extremes on either end don't matter so much.

And this is something that has surprised me. In many STEM fields a woman has to be well above average to make it in the door, and yet morons who are male are hired all the time even by companoes that claim to only hire the best.

Re: Exactly! Re:Girls better in non-STEM

[Darinbob]

My father was a 6th grade teacher and an ex-marine and no one ever thought of him as weak or effeminate. This was back in the day when teachers had respect from everyone. In fact, all the 6th grade teachers were men. If there was a stereotype it was that younger grades were for female teachers and later grades were for male teachers. 6th grade though was tough work, there were so many new hormones starting to flow that it was difficult to keep children behaved and focused. When my father went to teach 4th grade instead in the last few years before retirement he became much more relaxed and easy going.

Re:Exactly! Re:Girls better in non-STEM

[Roger W Moore]

That's not really what the study says.

That is EXACTLY what the study says. To quote: "The biggest gender gaps were in non-STEM subjects such as English, where girls earned 7.8% higher average grades and 13.8% less variable grades than boys.".

Re:Exactly! Re:Girls better in non-STEM

[Your.Master]

It frustrates me when people say that because I (a male) was bombarded nonstop growing up with efforts specifically to get more men into teaching and especially nursing (not so much social work, to be fair). I honestly don't get the assertion that nobody ever looks at that, which I see all the time, because from where I'm standing it's intensely looked-at. I suspect you just see the part where we're trying to get women into STEM because you're in STEM.

Re:Have Mercy!

[110010001000]

There is a book on this very topic: "The War on Boys". I haven't read it.

Re:Have Mercy!

[Opportunist]

Dildos are the worst kind of emasculation. Imagine the outcry if you reduced a woman to the essential parts!

Re:So, when are we going to do somethign about thi

[grasshoppa]

Kinda sad this got modded as "Funny" ( as of right now anyway ), it's more +5 Sad because you know it won't happen. Men and boys are expendable, they exist to support and provide for women...and that's precisely how society views them.

Welcome to the "patriarchy".

As an aside, I'm conflicted on encouraging more people to go to college. Funding is already a shitshow ( student loans being guaranteed, colleges having blank checks ), and the indoctrination environment on college campuses aren't healthy for people to be subjected to. That said, I would absolutely love to see programs aimed at boys for the trades ( construction, plumbing, electrical, machinists, ect... ).

Re:So, when are we going to do somethign about thi

[argStyopa]

I'm looking forward to the new Google counterpart to their "Ovaries in Coding" initiative:
Training & Educational Synergies Toward Individuals Creating Leading Experiences, ie Google TESTICLE.

Re:Brace yourselves...

[religionofpeas]

Let's first measure how big this bias is. Hint: you cannot measure bias by looking at number of men/women getting a STEM job.

Re:Have Mercy!

[Ol Olsoc]

Just playing devil's advocate here...

I've heard it argued that because education was female-dominated for so long, educational conditions and methods are actually skewed to favor females.

I do know that after males were largely evicted from schools, they even turned to drugging the boys to start the feminization process. Boys are rambunctious, rowdy, and cannot sit still. They need to be drugged to make them compliant like the girls, who show superior cooperation skills.

Note: I'll drop to serious mode from my trolling for a moment.

In a world where we are being told that there is no difference between male and female, that all is a social construct - it is very difficult to actually demonstrate that concept.

The male of the species is inherently restless unless drugged into compliance. The female of the species is much more docile and compliant as a child. Those statements are of course generalizations. There are always outliers in each.

But with the eviction of male teachers, who were pretty largely successful in keeping the boys under control, the female teachers in command of the schools, do not want that - they want all to be completely compliant.

They tried to get me to put my kid on Ritalin, I said no way. Instead, we put him in Ice hockey. Worked out so much better than his Ritalin addled schoolmates.

Re:Have Mercy!

[b0s0z0ku]

In the 42% high school teacher group, what is the distribution among science/math (vs English, language, history, art, etc) teachers? I'd suspect that STEM would skew male.

Not that Surprising

[Only Time Will Tell]

Some of the better scientists I've worked with in pharmaceutical chemistry and manufacturing were women. There were also great men as well. We worked in an encouraging environment that gave opportunities to present our data and to try out new hypothesizes without fear of being belittled for the experiments failing. Removing the competition aspect of the job (i.e. I've got to be better than s/he to get ahead) and focusing on collaboration and brainstorming with your fellow scientists allowed both genders to do great work.

Re:Not that Surprising

[110010001000]

Did any of your "hypothesizes" work out?

Re:Not that Surprising

[Only Time Will Tell]

Some did. We were working on lowering a tri-sulfide bridge forming in a particular drug during manufacturing and lowering the number of process steps. There were small wins and loses as we went along. I've since left the company, but last I heard they're looking to ramp up the new process into production.

Re:Have Mercy!

[lgw]

I do know that after males were largely evicted from schools, they even turned to drugging the boys to start the feminization process. Boys are rambunctious, rowdy, and cannot sit still. They need to be drugged to make them compliant like the girls, who show superior cooperation skills.

Eliminating recess was insane, IMO. Of course you're going to end up drugging young boys to get them to sit still!

They tried to get me to put my kid on Ritalin, I said no way. Instead, we put him in Ice hockey./quote

Nice! Glad it worked out for you.

"Variability Hypothesis" WTF?

[Ranbot]

From the summary: "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."

I have a hard time believing that out of 1.6M students the ends of the bell curve vary so extremely from those in the middle. Maybe there are other systematic issues.... just maybe? Not that I think we're going to fix systematic issues overnight, but we don't do ourselves any favors by avoiding them either.

Re:Have Mercy!

[MightyYar]

Probably - especially at the high school level.

But that doesn't really hurt the argument that the entire school and learning setup is skewed to favor females. Having essentially the same classroom setup, lecture-homework-test regime, schedule, etc but then plopping a guy vs a gal in the teacher's position doesn't really change all that much.

All of these bias arguments are very squishy and they require a lot of careful data analysis. Even fairly obvious biases like racial bias against black males are hard to suss out in data. Like I said, I'm kind of taking a devil's advocate position here - but it's definitely one way to interpret the data: "Look how biased schools are against males!"

Re:Brace yourselves...

[cascadingstylesheet]

Here comes a furious barrage of rationalization so that we don't have to acknowledge any possibility whatsoever of bias in STEM hiring. 3, 2, 1...

What does that even mean?

There's surely a bias in STEM hiring ... in favor of hiring women. The big tech companies are falling all over themselves trying to recruit women, teach girls to code, etc. etc.

Are you suggesting that leftist tech CEOs in Silicon valley are actually sexist pigs in disguise? Really?

Re:Have Mercy!

[Ol Olsoc]

Dildos are the worst kind of emasculation. Imagine the outcry if you reduced a woman to the essential parts!

The hands that wash dishes?

Ohhhhh, I'm gonna be crucified here.

But to your point, there has been talk about banning the increasingly realistic female "sex" dolls.

Re: Have Mercy!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not my observation. Perserverance is a better indicator of success than brilliance. I've met far more people who punched above their weight with average intellect and hard work than I ever did people who were brilliant but lazy.

Re:Have Mercy!

[Ol Olsoc]

I do know that after males were largely evicted from schools, they even turned to drugging the boys to start the feminization process. Boys are rambunctious, rowdy, and cannot sit still. They need to be drugged to make them compliant like the girls, who show superior cooperation skills.

Eliminating recess was insane, IMO. Of course you're going to end up drugging young boys to get them to sit still!

And for some of us, it never seems to end. After my body took enough abuse that I couldn't play Hockey to a good level, my wife kicks me out for recess. Now I hike, which doesn't work as well as an hour of intense cardio - a minute at a time, but point is, I still get restless and fidgety.

And in High school, they made a weird mistake, which made me have to take gym class 5 days a week. Loved that.

Wait a second. It just occured to me - maybe they figured out what I needed? Perhaps not a "mistake' at all.

Wait a second...

[dasunt]

If girls are better at non-STEM subjects, and equals at STEM subjects, shouldn't the STEM fields skew towards boys?

An average girl has less competition in a non-STEM field (due to boys under-performing), but more competition in a STEM field (do to boys and girls performing equally). So some girls will choose non-STEM over STEM.

While the average boy is less likely to be able to compete in a non-STEM field (due to boys doing worse in non-STEM subjects). So by elimination, that means more boys will go into STEM fields.

Or am I missing something?

sticking my neck out ...

[cascadingstylesheet]

Grades are ... highly elastic things.

I have kids in grade school right now. Sometimes they get to redo assignments if they did badly on them, sometimes they even get to redo tests. Sometimes homework counts for a lot, sometimes a little. Sometimes extra credit is possible, sometimes it isn't. Some teachers offer more extra help, some less.

There's a lot of room for ... what shall we call it, fudge factor? And I'm pretty sure I know what direction the pressure would be in this scenario.

So first things first; we may not "know" what we think we know from this study at all.

Re:sticking my neck out ...

[anegg]

Grades are ... highly elastic things.

I have two kids, one (male) a junior in high school, the other (female) a freshman in college. I and my wife both have STEM degrees and STEM careers. We also both organize and run extra-curricular STEM education programs (FIRST Robotics) for grades K-12. So... the subject of gender and STEM comes up a lot for us, as do grades versus ability.

Both of my kids suck at getting grades. Mostly due to missed assignments (aka homework). My daughter passed the AP Chemistry exam, but failed her AP Chemistry class (not just did poorly - failed). My son, who was building a Minecraft world "calculator" by making switching circuits from Minecraft materials when he was in middle school, is currently taking AP Computer Science with Java programming, and despite already knowing a fair amount of practical Java from his robotics programming, is pulling a "C" in the class.

Are my kids outliers? How many others are in the same boat - they don't get the grades, but they learn a lot, and can do a lot? Can grades be counted on as a measure of "ability"?

As for gender and STEM, at least as represented by participation in our community's FIRST robotics programs, we (my wife and I) see that in elementary school there is already somewhat of a predominance of males over females participating on teams, despite equal marketing and availability. By middle school, the males vastly outnumber the females; we are lucky if we get one or two interested females out of twenty or so interested students. In high school, the same pattern continues. We can bring in a more females than otherwise when we make a significantly greater effort to engage with females in recruiting, but the female attrition rate is higher than the male attrition rate. This is not to say that we haven't had some talented and engaged females in the programs - we have - but the predominance is towards males.

Re:"Variability Hypothesis" WTF?

[cascadingstylesheet]

I have a hard time believing that out of 1.6M students the ends of the bell curve vary so extremely from those in the middle.

Why?

Re:Another explanation is that grades are rigged..

[guruevi]

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.

Re:"Variability Hypothesis" WTF?

[Gibgezr]

You may have a hard time believing it, but it's generally believed to be true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The purpose of getting girls into STEM

[rsilvergun]

isn't to improve their lives, it's to increase the supply of STEM graduates and decrease their pay. It's not nothing to do with Gender inequality. There's no shortage of non-STEM graduates and their pay is plenty low enough, so nobody's going to throw money at them.

Don't forget, our education system isn't there to enrich lives, it's there to make people (at the top) rich. Heck, it started out as a system to train farm hands how to put up with factory work. I suppose we could change that, but nobody seems to want to spend the money.

Re:The purpose of getting girls into STEM

[lgw]

Meh, at least in software development the demand has grown as a result of growth in supply: the more you can automate, the more you want to automate. In my long-ish career I've see the labor force double every 5 years or so, and wages in the field rise quickly the whole time.

Training more people to enter a field only makes any real difference in wages when you get a significant over-supply, as h append with lawyers over the last decade or so. Not to say that couldn't happen with software, but these programs won't make that sort of difference. Exponential growth in supply has stopped, and all these programs are trivial in comparison to doubling the worldwide supply of developers again.

Re: Grade school math

[datavirtue]

It bounces off the walls and you hear screaming?

grade school vs career

[thePsychologist]

There is a huge difference between completing a grade school course and having what it takes to succeed in a STEM career like researcher. You don't have to be unusually gifted at math to succeed in K-12 math, nor do you need the level of perseverance necessary to complete a multi-year research project.

Not saying that there is a difference between the sexes, but as someone with nearly a decade of STEM career experience, it's obvious that this study does not say much about career-level work.

Re:So, when are we going to do somethign about thi

[swb]

You laugh, but we complain about this a lot.

Up through middle school we would get project assignments from non-art teachers that involved what amounted to an arts and crafts project (eg, a history assignment that was a diorama about Lincoln or something).

My son always got bad grades on those projects despite having a B+ or an A in the class generally because art wasn't his thing, and the grading on the project was biased towards its artistic content. I would inevitably go in to gripe about the grade he got and I would see the high-scoring projects were nearly all by girls, many of whom seem to be into "coloring".

And nearly all these projects were assigned by female teachers. Their responses were really frustrating, a lot of bullshit about the importance of presentation quality of submitted work, etc. "What about their actual knowledge of the subject?" and the teachers would kind of blanch and not want to say anymore.

My take is there is some kind of low-level bias going on here, the teachers see the girls being less interested in the subject matter and toss them an easy one to boost their grades. Last year we only had two, and my *wife* actually did the artistic part of the work herself on one of them -- still only a C+!! My wife was super pissed and thought that it was a definite sign that the grade was being issued based on gender, not on content, because from a production value perspective it was like business-meeting quality.

This year during the fall "curriculum night" I actually asked all the teachers how many "coloring assignments" there would be. Most didn't understand and I explained, "You know, those assignments where we do something artistic that has nothing to do with the content of the curriculum and is judged on artistic merit". To a person, all the female teachers looked pissed that I asked that. Totally busted.

Re:Have Mercy!

[Opportunist]

I have a dishwasher.

Old joke:
"Sir, do you already know the new and improved dishwasher?"
"No, my first wife's still alive."

Force women into STEM?

[firbolgar]

I'm surprised that nobody has yet suggested that women be forced to study a STEM degree in college. If you want to 'fix' the 'problem', why not go back to the source? "Oh, you wanted to do gender studies? Too bad, we need more women in STEM so enjoy EE"

It is all Ego

[Jastiv]

Men tend to think they are great and always right even when they are not. Women are taught to go along to get along even when the answer is wrong. The big egos of the men allow them to complete very difficult subject matter even when they are not as good as some of the women who drop out of the program. The fact they are encouraged to learn everything on tier own rather than bother with the classes helps a lot especially at the higher levels of math and science.

It's almost as though

[bblb]

It's almost as though gender doesn't dictate intelligence... and that the discrepancy in gender representation has more to do with individual pursuits than ability. Shocking.

The findings and conclusion are contradictory!

[GuB-42]

According to the summary, there is a gender difference!

The research, published today in Nature Communications, also shows that girls do better than boys in non-STEM subjects.

In other words, on average, girls have better grades than boys, but STEM is their weak point.

Think of it that way: imagine girls are excellent at poker, and average at chess, while boys suck at poker and are average at chess. Why would girls play chess when they have higher chance of winning by playing poker, and probably enjoy it more in the process? And why would boys play poker just get owned by any passing girl when they can play chess on a more level playing field. In the end boys will probably end up being better chess players because girls will be too busy playing poker.

Re:Another explanation is that grades are rigged..

[lgw]

Statistics are clearly showing that minorities and women are greatly over represented in college intakes in comparison to their grades.

Too broad a statement. Asians are significantly under-represented in comparison to their grades.

I don't see a problem with a bit of bias in favor of low-income students, because we know grades aren't a sufficient measure there: give them a bit of slack. But of course there are too many places with explicit racial quotas, instead of basing stuff on other background factors, which actually screws some minorities badly.

Female Dominated Field

[wisnoskij]

So the female dominated field of teaching, designed to accommodate teaching females gives better grades to females.

Re:Comparative Advantage

[Comrade Ogilvy]

I strongly suspect you are onto something important. If you are a young women with a full set of social skills and an A- in calculus, the world is your oyster: you have the mental horsepower to succeed as a doctor, lawyer, engineer, scientist, etc. -- pretty much anything. So, is such a person more likely to choose an exciting career in IT dominated by lots of young men with uncertain social skills, or do you choose to try to cure cancer while working with a very gender and ethnically diverse peers? Or maybe be a lawyer and get the more certain $250k per year salary? Or be a doctor and save lives? If the world is your oyster, maybe IT is not that attractive?

So what reflects expertise then?

[gosand]

I agree with what you are saying, and was planning to post a similar response about how grade can be meaningless in a lot of cases.
But instead, your post made me wonder what counts as "expertise"?

I think beyond "clearly an expert" and "clearly not an expert" it all gets very murky. I would be good to be able to measure it, but I don't know how you could do it. The Dunning-Kruger effect comes into play.

I remember when I interviewed for my current job, which is mostly a Windows shop, one of the architects asked me about my proficiency with Linux. I said that I had switched to it in '99 and never looked back. He said "oh, so you're an expert at it" and I assured him that I was not an expert. I said that I knew enough about it to know that there is so much more that I don't know. He tested me with a few questions like what distro I ran, how I would do this or that. I tried not to geek out in my answers, but he could tell I wasn't faking it.

As a manager, I always find it interesting, and quite disheartening, when interviewing candidates about their technical skills. It seems that candidates now like to categorize their skills by expertise levels. It's kind of disheartening when someone says they are an expert in Linux and they have no answer to "vi or emacs?". Or they don't know what grep is. I once had someone who "helped architect and implement in AWS". Since we were building a platform on AWS, I asked him about his experience with that. He admitted that he had NEVER worked in AWS.

So as I said, it would be nice to be able to measure expertise, I don't see how you could realistically actually do that.

Re:So what reflects expertise then?

[commodore64_love]

Have you thought some of those programs (vi, emacs) are obsolete today? In one interview I had a manager list all the CLI commands I use in Modelsim. Fortunately I had a good memory, but after I listed several routine commands I said:

"Honestly I just use the dropdown menus now, or drag cursors on the simulation window to inspect waveforms. It's faster and easier than typing a string of commands."

Re:So what reflects expertise then?

[m00sh]

I agree with what you are saying, and was planning to post a similar response about how grade can be meaningless in a lot of cases. But instead, your post made me wonder what counts as "expertise"?

I think beyond "clearly an expert" and "clearly not an expert" it all gets very murky. I would be good to be able to measure it, but I don't know how you could do it. The Dunning-Kruger effect comes into play.

I remember when I interviewed for my current job, which is mostly a Windows shop, one of the architects asked me about my proficiency with Linux. I said that I had switched to it in '99 and never looked back. He said "oh, so you're an expert at it" and I assured him that I was not an expert. I said that I knew enough about it to know that there is so much more that I don't know. He tested me with a few questions like what distro I ran, how I would do this or that. I tried not to geek out in my answers, but he could tell I wasn't faking it.

As a manager, I always find it interesting, and quite disheartening, when interviewing candidates about their technical skills. It seems that candidates now like to categorize their skills by expertise levels. It's kind of disheartening when someone says they are an expert in Linux and they have no answer to "vi or emacs?". Or they don't know what grep is. I once had someone who "helped architect and implement in AWS". Since we were building a platform on AWS, I asked him about his experience with that. He admitted that he had NEVER worked in AWS.

So as I said, it would be nice to be able to measure expertise, I don't see how you could realistically actually do that.

I think completely different scenarios.

In a classroom, I teach a course, give them work, grade their work and compare their work to give a grade. At the end of the semester, I have a good understanding of their level of expertise of the student in the course material and the prerequisite knowledge that they have to have to do the course.

Interviewing candidates is a different problem. You're looking for expertise in content that you are familiar with and the candidate is not.

A coworker of mine said that interviewing is a game of chance. You get the job where you know the answers to the questions asked in the interview. His ratio was 10-20 interviews to one job.

Re:So what reflects expertise then?

[serviscope_minor]

Have you thought some of those programs (vi, emacs) are obsolete today?

No. Next question.

Re:So what reflects expertise then?

[gosand]

A coworker of mine said that interviewing is a game of chance. You get the job where you know the answers to the questions asked in the interview. His ratio was 10-20 interviews to one job.

I'd say that's about the right ratio. Although, you can answer every single question correctly and still not get the job. Because it's not always about the answers. Usually when we get together after the interviews to talk about the candidates, and we are considering someone, we ask "would you want them on your team?" It's usually the deciding factor.

The science is settled when it says what we want

[Crashmarik]

lol

Re:"Variability Hypothesis" WTF?

[Ranbot]

1) 1.6M is a very large sample size and large sample sizes [typically] have less variability throughout the data set, including the extremes.
2) There are decades of very well documented systemic gender biases in STEM fields.
3) The "variability hypothesis" still begs the question: Why? If one claims extreme-spectrum boys are inherently/genetically/socially better at STEM than extreme-spectrum girls, that claim ignores the data from nearly 1.6M other students showing girls and boys are equally adept. I think it's a little ridiculous not to consider decades of systemic gender bias to at least be a factor in the "variability."

Re:Another explanation is that grades are rigged..

[guruevi]

I should have put minority in quotes because how we define minorities is totally arbitrary. Asians are typically considered "white" in these equality metrics. Mixed race people are considered depending on what suits the equality metrics best.

Re:So, when are we going to do somethign about thi

[commodore64_love]

> I've heard of boys being told that cooking and even book clubs are not for them, due to toxic ideas of what masculinity is a

Even if a boy grows his hair long, below his shoulder, he gets told "You need to get a cut... you look like a girl." Teachers, preachers, random audlts, fellow classmates/bullies. There's nothing more natural than long hair (for both sexes) but our society won't allow it.

It's interests, not ability

[Northdot]

Maybe, just maybe, the gender disparity in STEM is not because of lack of ability, but because of lack of interest?

Let's be honest - men as a group are more interested in things, and women are more interested in people. As a group. Obviously there are overlaps on both sides of the bell curves.

This is not something that requires "fixing". It just is what it is.

Re:So, when are we going to do somethign about thi

[HornWumpus]

They banned us.

I was required to take a focus liberal arts area, so I found the one with the best ratio (psychology, had yet to lean to not stick my dick into crazy).

Turns out, every engineering student had done the same thing. We were required to take a liberal arts focus area _other_than_psych_, as we were blowing the curves while treating the classes as a dating pool.

Re: Have Mercy!

[HornWumpus]

Maybe you work in a field that doesn't pay well enough to get any smart, driven people?

If it's smart or driven, sure, but why not both?

Drive has positive, built in feedback. Stupid people get little positive feedback from their drive, as they often work really stupid and fail, despite hard work. I'd bet that measures of 'conscientiousness' (the big 5 trait) are positively correlated to IQ, more so as the person gets older. Only partly because the people are figuring out the right answers to the personality assessment (not everyone is a cynic, some are dumb).

Re:"Variability Hypothesis" WTF?

[Ranbot]

You may have a hard time believing it, but it's generally believed to be true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

...believed to be true based on one psychology researcher's work from 1920's and 1930's, and a few cherry-picked modern studies, which on the whole are pretty mixed and inconclusive. But thanks for the link anyway... I learn something new everyday....

Re:If course it shows that

[serviscope_minor]

If it showed boys consistently outperformed girls on math and science, it wouldn't be allowed to be published.

Yeah, the deep state would prevent it. It wouldn't even help if the journal editors wore a tinfoil hat to protect themselves. What the mind control rays miss, the chemtrails will get.

Re:So, when are we going to do somethign about thi

[godrik]

This is rated funny, but this is not funny.
It is a problem and it needs to be solved.

All bias in society are a bad thing, and bias against males are important to solve as well. My understanding is that federal funding for this is available as well. Did anyone bother applying to get it?

Re:Have Mercy!

[sfcat]

Now effort is re-focusing on helping boys reach the same level.

Citation needed...it would be nice if true but nothing in my son's public educational experience (he is 18) bore this out in any way shape or form.

Yeah, I wasn't joking.

[gerald.edward.butler]

But, I was engaging in "Satire", a form of humor that's purpose is to critique and draw attention to a social issue. So, "Funny" is appropriate in my book. "Funny" as in humorously on point.

Not sarcasm.

[gerald.edward.butler]

Satire. The two are slightly different things.

Re:Not sarcasm.

[b0bby]

True, I stand corrected!

Re:Have Mercy!

[AmiMoJo]

I'm afraid I don't know much about the US system specifically. In the UK there are grants available for male teachers due to a shortage, and a lot of research and pilot programmes. Basically all the same stuff that worked for girls.

Not really surprising.

[Qbertino]

Gender differences manifest the strongest where mating comes into play. It's by emphasising those differences that people men and women alike seek advantage in the mating market. That's why often men act more manly than they are and women act more girly than they ought to.

Re:So, when are we going to do somethign about thi

[Daralantan]

Even if a boy grows his hair long, below his shoulder, he gets told "You need to get a cut... you look like a girl."

I had long hair for a while. I often got "You look like Jesus, Curt Cobain,-" and a few others. That and any older people that saw me walking would look at me in fear as thought I was some terrifying criminal. I remember looking up stuff about long hair and interviews, and I found forums online for hiring managers and such. I would see them say stuff like: "If a guy comes in and his hair is below his ears, I automatically mark him as a failed interview and nothing he or his resume says will change that for me."

Re:Have Mercy!

[lgw]

Imagine the outcry if you reduced a woman to the essential parts!

Men will be obsolete the day they invent a robot that can open jars and kill spiders.

6.2 is less than 10

[s4080326]

The write of this study is so far from what the data shows it's silly. The headline is that there is no reason to see more men in stem than women. However the data shows that is the case at 10% of the population, i.e. if more than 10% of people work in stem it will be majority women and if less than 10% of people work in stem it will be majority men. What makes this study misleading is it didn't mention that only 6.2% of careers are in stem fields. It also didn't mention what the expected break-down was at this point.

Re:So, when are we going to do somethign about thi

[swb]

I don't think the grading itself is biased, but I do think that female teachers like to throw their female students these "girl projects" that are definitely skewed to female-oriented skill sets.

Maybe this means most education tasks suffer from a male bias, but we're talking classes like Social Students and English where it's reading, writing, class discussion, fairly neutral things that ought not have much gender bias.

Exposure and role models

[sjbe]

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

Is this really true? I'm not so sure you have the evidence to back that claim up. Certainly more men go into STEM fields than women currently but that does not prove that the reason is because of interest or inclination. I'm not convinced that men are inherently more interested in technical fields than women. I think the reasons that women currently tend to avoid these fields is more complicated than mere inclination. The reasons seem (to me) to be predominately cultural expectations with some other factors thrown in there too.

I saw a study a while back that the #1 factor in whether a girl decides to go into a STEM field turns out to be whether or not there is a female parent or close relative who is also in a STEM field. Turns out it's hard to imagine yourself in a job if you don't see anyone that resembles you in that job. Why don't we see more men in nursing for example? Certainly not a lack of aptitude for the job and I doubt it's any sort of inherent lack of interest in the work itself. I think the reasons are social stigma and holdover effects of traditional gender roles and it's something that happens to both genders differing only in the field where one or the other gender historically dominates. It's only recently that women achieved parity in admissions to medical school to become MDs. It used to be almost unheard of to find a male nurse but it's becoming more common. Honestly the reason I'm probably an engineer today is because I come from a family of engineers. Nobody around me in my school went into engineering and it wasn't a subject that was taught or explained in school. My wife probably would have made a terrific engineer but she never really had any exposure to the field until she met me. My sister got her undergraduate degree in civil engineering and I'm certain this is because she was exposed to the field as she grew up.