Girls’ advantage in reading can largely explain the gender gap in STEM | Hacker News Reader

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

pnas.org

46 pointsmpweiher37 comments

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? There is just as much reading going on in STEM as out, and arguably more intensive reading in.

It seems like the score difference is probably related to the gender-gap somehow, but I doubt it is a cause. I would be interested in reading the article if it was freely available.

> 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

  And how does being better at reading
  steer people away from STEM?

By steering them towards non-STEM.

The funny version I heard was basically that girls are like super humans compared to boys. They're good at Math but they're also good at non-Math too. The boys on the other hand are bad at Math compared to the girls. They're also bad at non-Math but they're not equally bad. They're really really bad at non-Math and merely bad at Math.

What to do? For the boys the choice is easy - go with what you're best at. For the girls on the other hand it's harder - what do you do if you're good at everything? The answer is to do whatever you enjoy the most. So all the boys go into STEM and the girls spread their talents all over the map.

It's probably not a true deception of reality but it's certainly a funny one.

I’ve had this thought that intelligence and talent is actually very limiting. You need to be a little stupid to sit in front of a computer for 10 hours straight. You need to be a little stupid to go into a coal mine, or work on a fishing boat, or chase down criminals.

As much as we like to think talent = productivity, maybe it’s more of a curve? You need to be just talented enough to maximize productivity. Too much talent and you never get anything done.

It's a thing, and well-studied, at least on some levels. The top achievers in any given high school cohort usually aren't the kids with the highest measured IQs, for instance, and the kids with the highest measured IQs aren't usually more successful after graduation.

I wonder how this theory squares with the relatively high percentage of women that are accountants, tax advisors, investment professionals, actuaries, etc.

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 math-intensive fields.

They aren't “math intensive fields”, they are "calculation intensive fields".

I think you should check your irony meter.

dragonwriter was obviously being ironic. Meaning he thinks those ARE "math intensive fields". Which they really aren't.

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.

I don’t know about gender differences.

The classes are at least initially perceived as easy for most people, but while some find them fun other find it horribly boring. So, my guess it’s less about aptitude than liking the kind of work involved.

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.

There are campaigns for things like nursing [1]

  “Through these campaigns [...] to challenge the
  stereotypical image of nursing as a female career so the
  increase of 9% among male applicants (19% among 18 year
  olds) is particularly excellent news.

Also for things like teaching [2].

And for things like professional-level ballet schools recruit 50% male and 50% female, despite many more female applicants, due to the practical needs of teaching partnering.

[1] https://www.england.nhs.uk/2019/02/young-male-nursing-applic... [2] https://www.tes.com/news/so-you-want-get-more-men-primary-te...

> 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!)

that maybe because at least in the past males were dominating society, so this is more about addressing that domination rather than uneven performance.

in areas where mailes are under-represented (nurses for example, or early childhood teachers) the problem is not males performance but their lack of motivation or lack of encouragement.

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

We tend to see differences and fit an explanation.

- For some, the differences are explainable by completely benign reasons (“girls just aren’t interested / girls have a comparative advantage in non-STEM fields”),

- others see a conspiracy of intention (“men are trying to keep women out”),

- others see a malevolent but unconscious system (“thoughtless behaviors drive women away”),

- others see a relatively benign but unconscious system (“girls are given dolls where boys are given computers”)

I am old enough to remember being bullied in school for being into computers. I remember one or two girls along the way that hung out with the rest of us nerds in the computer labs. Nobody much cared about the gender breakdown as far as I could tell—most of the adult men and women I knew expressed something between distaste and hostility to the notion that a youngster would waste so much time on these stupid toys.

I think once computers established their bonafides as an economic ladder, people started to take note. But by that time, those of us relegated to hiding from bullies in the computer labs came to be the face of the computer industry. I suspect that probably exerts subtle pressure on the younger generation to conform (“these people don’t look like me, listen to my music, understand my culture, share my gender—I guess this just isn’t what my people do.”

I suspect people encounter some degree of all of these things. This kind of research study is interesting in trying to suss our relative contribution.

> I am old enough to remember being bullied in school for being into computers.

Yep, when I was young, even some of my teachers and other adults tried to dissuade me from computers and programming. I remember being mocked and ridiculed by other kids, and no one was incentivizing it when I was in school. If anything, people were avoiding it because it was uncool. I always thought it was the social stigma present in their own peer groups that were keeping them away from it, and not gatekeeping, at least from what I witnessed.

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?

That’s how I understood it but I feel the same way as you do about my text comprehensions skills.

> so they like more humanistic faculties

Either that ("like more", ie preference), or they ask themselves what they're good at ("intraindividual comparisons of achievement"), and conclude that a career with words rather than numbers is better suited for them.

>> Or my text comprehension is that bad?

That depends. Are you a woman or a man? /s

It may be that the advantage in reading simply correlates with stronger interest in people/'social' stuff and weaker interest in STEM - this would then be the actual causative factor. One could guess that being interested in people/stories/'social' things would incent girls to read more and get better and better at reading.

My hunch about the reading skills gap is that little boys like physical movement marginally more than little girls, thus boys struggle to sit still and read.

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 your own reading skills (at least when you're young).

It feels right, it was a really tough choice between math and philosophy for me and only peer pressure sent me to STEMs (and i sometime regret it). I'm gonna wait until replication is done until i define an opinion.

That's interesting and a very strange idea to me, I never considered comparing "maths ability" vs "reading ability" because I never saw subjects on a scale from "reading <-> maths".

For me the scale was more like "problem solving <-> wrote learning" and I did everything I could to avoid stuff on the RHS.

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.

When growing up, did you equally share duties around the house?

One of the guys I grew up with was the middle child between two girls. Girls never had to do chores, he helped with garbage and dishes, and in later years, helped with renos and yard work.

My point being that he was basically trained from birth to be productive, whereas his sisters were always allowed to explore their creativities (since they didn’t have to do chores). His sisters both have liberal arts degrees and have bounced around jobs, but he owns a very successful landscaping company.

I like to think so. We were both essentially left with the order of "the house should be clean when I get home from work." From there we usually rotated dish washing, tidying common areas, etc.

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.

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.

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