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

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

[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.

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.

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?

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

[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.

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.

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: 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: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: 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

[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.