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Women Avoid STEM Degrees to Get Better Grades?

posted by janrinok on Wednesday March 12 2014, @04:35PM   Printer-friendly
from the this-will-not-be-controversial-oh-no-sir dept.

GungnirSniper writes:

"Catherine Rampell at The Washington Post has 'A message to the nation's women: Stop trying to be straight-A students.'

In her analysis of others' findings, she writes of a discouragement gradient that pushes women out of harder college degrees, including economics and other STEM degrees. Men do not seem to have a similar discouragement gradient, so they stay in harder degree programs and ultimately earn more. Data suggests that women might also value high grades more than men do and sort themselves into fields where grading curves are more lenient.

'Maybe women just don't want to get things wrong,' Goldin hypothesized. 'They don't want to walk around being a B-minus student in something. They want to find something they can be an A student in. They want something where the professor will pat them on the back and say "You're doing so well!"'

'Guys,' she added, 'don't seem to give two damns.'

Why are women in college moving away from harder degrees?"

 
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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Koen on Wednesday March 12 2014, @05:02PM

    by Koen (427) on Wednesday March 12 2014, @05:02PM (#15526)

    In her analysis of others' findings, she writes of a discouragement gradient that pushes women out of harder college degrees, including economics and other STEM degrees.

    This is the first time that I see economics included in the Science/Technology/Engineering/Mathematics group.

    Sure, there is a lot of maths in economics (I teach maths to economics students), but at my university economics is part of the humanities.

    My colleague Scott Gasler who teaches economics tells me: "I studied economics because that is so remote from reality."

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by wjwlsn on Wednesday March 12 2014, @05:09PM

    by wjwlsn (171) on Wednesday March 12 2014, @05:09PM (#15531) Homepage Journal

    I think the article only used Economics as a lead-in. Later in the article, the focus gets switched, presumably because STEM-related articles seem to be popular lately:

    Another research project, led by Peter Arcidiacono at Duke University, is finding similar trends in science, technology, engineering and mathematics...

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    I am a traveler of both time and space. Duh.

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by GungnirSniper on Wednesday March 12 2014, @05:24PM

    by GungnirSniper (1671) on Wednesday March 12 2014, @05:24PM (#15542) Journal

    Submitter here. You are probably right, it's not strictly STEM, but of the mathematical part called Econometrics [wikipedia.org] could be STEM. From Wikipedia:

    Econometrics is the application of mathematics, statistical methods, and, more recently, computer science, to economic data and is described as the branch of economics that aims to give empirical content to economic relations. More precisely, it is "the quantitative analysis of actual economic phenomena based on the concurrent development of theory and observation, related by appropriate methods of inference." An introductory economics textbook describes econometrics as allowing economists "to sift through mountains of data to extract simple relationships."

    So good catch, thank you, I learned something new today.