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Study of 1.6 Million Grades Shows Little Gender Difference in Math and Science at School (theconversation.com)
A study of school grades of more than 1.6 million students shows that girls and boys perform similarly in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) subjects. From a report: The research, published today in Nature Communications, also shows that girls do better than boys in non-STEM subjects. Our results provide evidence that large gaps in the representation of women in STEM careers later in life are not due to differences in academic performance. One explanation for gender imbalance in STEM is the "variability hypothesis." This is the idea that gender gaps are much larger at the tails of the distribution -- among the highest and lowest performers -- than in the middle.
There isn't a big financial incentive to go into STEM jobs if you are a college-educated professional. The pay is good, but there is a limit to your professional growth and you have to actually do work and produce results. In reality, sales and marketing at tech companies make as much or more as STEM people. So unless you really enjoy STEM, it is better off avoiding it as a career. I think many women have figured this out.
>> 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.
Considering the authors, the funding source and even that they get funding to study gender issues, smells of a biased result.
Boys and girls have both the same abilities. However, boys tend to be more inclined to pursue studies in science.
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.
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?
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.
-Styopa
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.
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.
Statistics are clearly showing that minorities and women are greatly over represented in college intakes in comparison to their grades.
Schools are picking lower scoring individuals to satisfy some sort of equality metric; those people consistently fail and drop out resulting in a much more natural end result (diversity among those graduating college once again falls in line with the scoring results).
So efforts to get some sort of outcome-driven equality, fail all the time. Nordic communities likewise found that out, they are amongst the highest scoring in actual equality but classic gender and race patterns are emerging stronger than elsewhere.
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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.
"Giving up on helping" is orthagonal to "biological difference". Insisting on equality of outcome (such as perfect gender balance) is tyranny. The goal should be enabling those who want to be a software developer or a nurse or whatever become that without placing gender-based obstacles in their way. Twisting people's arms to make them want to pursue a given field should never be a goal.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
when we are talking about differences between sexes biology is a default explanation
That isn't justified when science is telling us that it's mostly social,
Science never said that. Social "science" says that, and they often say it with next to no evidence.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
> 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.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall