Girls’ advantage in reading explains gender gap in math-related fields | Hacker News Reader

Girls’ advantage in reading explains gender gap in math-related fields

marginalrevolution.com

41 pointsBostonian8 comments

This is an insanely overconfident article, given that the field in question has dozens of confounding variables that likely can't be reduced to a pat conclusion+prescription.

I guess that makes it par for the course for Tabarrok. He reminds me of all my econ friends at unnamed Ivy League school who learned linear regressions freshman year and then started applying them to everything.

One way to easily corroborate this hypothesis is to check the acceptance rates of men and women that apply for STEM fields.

This reminds me of the UC Berkeley lawsuit, where it was found that women were more likely to be accepted into almost any department, and that women were less likely to be accepted overall because they overwhelmingly applied to more competitive departments. The numbers are here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox#UC_Berkele... . The wiki article doesn't list the names of each department, but it's worth noting that every single department with a majority of men (think: STEM) is more likely to accept any given woman than any given man.

Indeed. The "largely" in the article's headline is a blatant lie. It cannot largely explain, it probably just largely correlates, considering the samples at hand. One could write tens of similarly attention-catching articles with other variables "explaining" the issue. The article's conclusion contains a call to action: "Stop telling people to do what they are good at and instead tell them to do what pays!" Now, there is actually evidence that women in countries where there are strong socio-economic incentives to study STEM (Iran, India) are more likely to do so than women in western countries. Not that this explains the whole picture, either, but it's certainly interesting.

agree. marginal revolution has really gone downhill in recent years

https://www.bbc.com/news/education-31751672

> But it also reveals that teachers can be biased towards giving girls higher results than boys, even when they have produced the same quality of work.

It would be ironic if bias against boys (likely more egregious in more subjectively marked areas like the humanities) drives them to the more lucrative STEM fields.

This is ridiculous.

Women are not drawn, for the most part, to the narrow form of detailed reasoning required in math and the hard sciences. The most important word in this statement is “narrow.”

This also means we have a major responsibility to protect the opportunities of women who choose to follow these disciplines, and to deal harshly with stereotypical discrimination.

Flagged. Unscientific gender baiting.

From the paper behind this blog article:

> Relying on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data, we show that female students who are good at math are much more likely than male students to be even better in reading

You could more naturally state that as "at the same reading level, girls tend to be worse at math."

Most people on the planet are bad at math. STEM is a funky autistic sort of thing, though useful, and I'm glad that I'm good about it. But this constant desire to remake women over into something they are not (funky and autistic) needs to stop. I wish the busy-bodies would leave my daughters alone and let them enjoy what they enjoy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com