Girls’ advantage in reading can largely explain the gender gap in STEM • Hacker News Board

Re: Girls’ advantage in reading can largely explain the gender gap in STEM

#21

Post by jdavis703 » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 1:20 PM UTC

orwin wrote: post #9

darkwater wrote: post #3

Is this suggesting that girls do not choose STEM faculties because they can read better so they like more humanistic faculties, where there are more texts (as in literature books) to read? Or my text comprehension is that bad?

Not exactly. From what i understood, this article is telling that if someone feel he is better at reading/comprehension than he is at math, he is more likely to not go into math-related field, regardless of his math performance compared to the average. To dumb it up, most of the time, you don't go into a math-related field because you compare your math skills with other, but because you compare your math skills with…

Me and my sister were homeschooled and only one grade level apart.

So this ancedote is kind of like a twin study. We both did great at reading, in most years on standardized California Achievement Tests we'd be in the 98th or top percentile for reading. On the other hand for math we were always below the median, sometimes our score was so low we were in danger of the state forcing us to be in public school.

These results probably aren't surprising, we both had essentially the same educational experience.

Interestingly enough we both went on to different universities with full scholarships. She chose creative writing. I (he) chose information technology.

I don't know what can explain this aside from random variation, because this study certainly doesn't explain this well.

Re: Girls’ advantage in reading can largely explain the gender gap in STEM

#22

Post by FabHK » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 1:21 PM UTC

johnrbent wrote: post #19

I don't know much about this field (and I did not purchase the full article), but it seems like quite a leap to assume this is a source of the gender-gap. First of all, you're talking about 80% of one standard deviation difference in reading-to-math scores between males and females - that doesn't seem like enough to study it as the cause of anything. And how does being better at reading steer people away from STEM? T…

> that doesn't seem like enough to study it as the cause of anything

Unless I'm mistaken, their measure is basically Cohen's d, and 0.8 is indeed considered a large effect in the social sciences (look at the table in [1]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_size#Cohen's_d

Re: Girls’ advantage in reading can largely explain the gender gap in STEM

#23

Post by DanBC » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 1:22 PM UTC

Bostonian wrote: post #13

I see vastly more attention given to areas where girls are under-represented, with the belief that such disparities are inequities to be fixed, than I do to areas where males perform worse. It seems that male deficits are largely accepted. Could the male disadvantage in reading be reduced by different instructional methods (more phonics) or with reading material that appeals to boys?

> than I do to areas where males perform worse.

This is only because you're not looking.

Re: Girls’ advantage in reading can largely explain the gender gap in STEM

#24

Post by michaelt » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 1:23 PM UTC

norswap wrote: post #12

dragonwriter wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously, those (as well as, say, the biological sciences) are not “math intensive fields”, despite appearances to the contrary, whereas churning out CRUD apps is math intensive... EDIT: Or, to be fair to the authors, other factors besides relative reading ability, as well as as accounting for the other 20% of the gender gap in math-intensive fields in general, also explain the gender distribution between particular…

I was puzzled by "churning out CRUD apps is math intensive" - could you explain? I do agree that the aforementioned fields are not necessarily math-intensive — except investment professional in certain cases.

dragonwriter is being facetious.

An accountant or tax adviser needs reasonable applied math skills, but isn't likely to need to know the difference between a cardinality and a cartesian product.

Likewise, most working programmers don't need to know the difference in their day-to-day work - although they might need to in order to pass a CS degree as a gateway to getting hired.

Re: Girls’ advantage in reading can largely explain the gender gap in STEM

#25

Post by tyingq » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 1:27 PM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #24

norswap wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was puzzled by "churning out CRUD apps is math intensive" - could you explain? I do agree that the aforementioned fields are not necessarily math-intensive — except investment professional in certain cases.

dragonwriter is being facetious. An accountant or tax adviser needs reasonable applied math skills, but isn't likely to need to know the difference between a cardinality and a cartesian product. Likewise, most working programmers don't need to know the difference in their day-to-day work - although they might need to in order to pass a CS degree as a gateway to getting hired.

The premise of the article, though, doesn't seem to hinge on higher level or complex math.

Re: Girls’ advantage in reading can largely explain the gender gap in STEM

#26

Post by mac_was » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 1:37 PM UTC

Maybe just most women aren’t interested in STEM, like most men aren’t interested in hairdressing? Those who are, both men and women, can get jobs as I see women being very good programmers and men being very good hair dressers

Re: Girls’ advantage in reading can largely explain the gender gap in STEM

#27

Post by darklion » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 1:40 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #23

Bostonian wrote: post #13

I see vastly more attention given to areas where girls are under-represented, with the belief that such disparities are inequities to be fixed, than I do to areas where males perform worse. It seems that male deficits are largely accepted. Could the male disadvantage in reading be reduced by different instructional methods (more phonics) or with reading material that appeals to boys?

> than I do to areas where males perform worse. This is only because you're not looking.

Can you point to fields where male under-representation is given the same weight as fields with male over-representation?

This isn't a troll--I'm genuinely interested in seeing which fields and areas are trying to promote more balanced gender representation.

Re: Girls’ advantage in reading can largely explain the gender gap in STEM

#28

Post by 0815test » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 1:43 PM UTC

Bostonian wrote: post #13

I see vastly more attention given to areas where girls are under-represented, with the belief that such disparities are inequities to be fixed, than I do to areas where males perform worse. It seems that male deficits are largely accepted. Could the male disadvantage in reading be reduced by different instructional methods (more phonics) or with reading material that appeals to boys?

> more phonics

This paper is about high-school students, where the difference between "phonics" and (largely discredited) "real language" approaches to basic literacy skills is simply not relevant. The gap in "reading skills" is not really measuring literacy, it's more about all sorts of other stuff that the authors don't really get into. (We can assume that what's being tested is "text comprehension" of a sort, but better text-comprehension skills are hardly an obstacle for STEM!)

Re: Girls’ advantage in reading can largely explain the gender gap in STEM

#29

Post by jerf » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 1:45 PM UTC

darkwater wrote: post #3

Is this suggesting that girls do not choose STEM faculties because they can read better so they like more humanistic faculties, where there are more texts (as in literature books) to read? Or my text comprehension is that bad?

While this isn't what they necessarily said, to add another point of view, consider a population X which has a job option A, and a equally-sized population Y which has options A and B. In this simplified-beyond-reality model, it would be fully expected that Y will not be "equally represented" in job A. It also won't be "equally represented" in job B, as it will have 100% of the positions.

This is not a complete explanation of anything, but a tidbit to keep in mind.

Re: Girls’ advantage in reading can largely explain the gender gap in STEM

#30

Post by michaelt » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 1:54 PM UTC

darkwater wrote: post #3

Is this suggesting that girls do not choose STEM faculties because they can read better so they like more humanistic faculties, where there are more texts (as in literature books) to read? Or my text comprehension is that bad?

The abstract mentions "choice models in which educational decisions involve intraindividual comparisons of achievement and self-beliefs in different subjects"

This is a fancy way of saying lots of kids'll stick with the things they think they do best at; and they'll decide that by comparing themselves to their peers and comparing that between subjects.

For example, if Alice is a 75th-percentile maths student and a 85th-percentile english student; whereas Bob is a 75th-percentile maths student an a 65th-percentile english student, Alice is less likely to study maths than Bob despite having the same marks in maths as she recognises her talents lie elsewhere.