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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: 2, Interesting) by velex on Wednesday March 12 2014, @08:11PM

    by velex (2068) on Wednesday March 12 2014, @08:11PM (#15623)

    How does that explain gender difference in career choice?

    Maybe we're socializing cis women to be too emotionally fragile and we aren't emphasizing enough to them that they need to get a "real" job. I think most of us here know from being socialized as boys that it's clear from about day one that you're going to need a "real" job unless you plan to die homeless in a gutter. Perhaps we should be suspending entitlement programs that cis women are the primary recipients of and giving girls that impression as well.

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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 13 2014, @09:59AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 13 2014, @09:59AM (#15861)
    Thanks to you, I'm writing a script to remove all instances of the string " cis " from my browser. Go back to tumblr with that shit.

    • (Score: 1) by velex on Thursday March 13 2014, @12:35PM

      by velex (2068) on Thursday March 13 2014, @12:35PM (#15958)

      How do you propose I delineate trans women from cis women then?

      Or is your real issue that I would dare to be suspicious of individuals born with their reproductive systems on the inside who tend to use a fundamentally sexist worldview as an excuse any time they fail at something?

      I don't know why you think the term cis woman is from tumblr. The term was formalized by Julia Serano in her book Whipping Girl. The other term I use, womyn-born-womyn, was promulgated by and is used by feminists themselves to delineate trans women from cis women. I can't think of any other terms that would both make you happy and allow me to effectively express my point about socialization and the error of supposing that these differences are due to the differences in male and female brains.