This Is Why Gender Gap Rebuttals Are Silly: Girls Are in the Lead Academically Worldwide

When trying to put together an informed opinion, it’s important to consider all sides and then run screaming from the rabbit hole of insanity you’ve inevitably fallen into. In the course of reading what our detractors have to say, we’ve noticed that some people actually think the gender gap in science and tech employment is because women either don’t want to be in those fields or, worse, because boys just innately have minds that are geared towards them.

This research will come as somewhat of a shock to those people: girls generally outperform boys in academics including math and science, even when the odds really are stacked against them by outside forces. A study published in Intelligence looked at the academic achievements of 15-year-olds in countries around the world from 2000-2010 and found that girls performed better than boys in fully 70% of countries surveyed while only falling behind in 4% (Colombia, Costa Rica and the Indian state, Himachal Pradesh).

David Geary, Curators Professor of Psychological Sciences in the College of Arts and Science at MU and co-author on the study, said in the University’s news release, “Even in countries where women’s liberties are severely restricted, we found that girls are outperforming boys in reading, mathematics, and science literacy by age 15, regardless of political, economic, social or gender equality issues and policies found in those countries.” In fact, in some regions where gender equality in society is poor, the education gap favoring girls is larger than places with better equality overall.

So what’s up with the gender gap in science and tech? Well, aside from the obvious entrenched institutional and societal factors that keep women out, one theory the authors of the study put forward is that women lean towards humanities and language-based studies in college not because they’re worse at math and science, but because they tend to be even better in those other subjects.

So there you have it, brogrammers: You’re not doing all the coding because women can’t handle it; they’re just too busy doing all the other things you aren’t good at.

(via Phys.org, image via woodleywonderworks)

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