Why don’t more girls grow up to become scientists and engineers? It’s not that they’re bad at math, a new study argues. It’s that they’re even better at reading.
is the primary reason why women are outnumbered by men in technical fields, according to a report published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.of the French National Center for Scientific Research, came to this conclusion by analyzing survey data from 300,000 high school students in 64 countries around the world.
Previous research has focused on gender discrimination of women in scientific fields and how societal norms influence girls’ career aspirations. The new study is different because it focuses on the strengths of individual students from all over the world. The researchers found that on the whole, boys had a stronger attraction to math classes than girls did. For instance, the proportion of boys who said they wanted to take more math classes instead of more reading classes was nearly 8 percentage points higher than it was for girls. In addition, the proportion of boys who said they intended to “study harder” in math than in reading was almost 6 percentage points higher than it was for girls.
The researchers wondered whether this difference could be linked to students’ math ability. In other words, are boys simply better at math than girls?Sort of. On both math and reading tests, the average score for all students was slightly below 500. But on the math test, the average score for boys was about 10 points higher than for girls.
The results clearly refute the idea that girls don’t have what it takes to succeed in technical careers, Riegle-Crumb said. What’s more, each student’s relative strength in math versus reading was a good predictor of whether they intended to — and ultimately did — enroll in courses that emphasized math.
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