Interesting reason for gender gap in tech: parents invest more in girls' early education
How to encourage girls' interest in tech — Newsletter No. 6
Interesting new research was published recently by American Economic Association, providing some new outlook on the reasons behind gender-gap in STEM.
More precisely, why do girls, as early as middle school, self-select out of STEM courses at greater rates than boys?
In this paper, scientists used a longitudinal field experiment with 953 children and their parents to investigate whether there are differences in parental investments at early ages by child gender. They further investigate whether such investments are associated with test scores in math and language arts at older ages.
The researchers link women’s under-representation in STEM to their over-representation in nonSTEM fields. Prior work argues that this over-representation arises from women’s comparative advantage in language arts (Breda and Napp, 2019; Goulas et al., 2020), which emerges as early as age 5 (DiPrete and Jennings, 2011).
A key question, therefore, is why might women have a comparative advantage in language arts?
Since this advantage appears to arise early, early parental investments may play a role. As many researchers argue (such as List et al, 2018), parents play a central role in the development of child skills.
And… The researchers come to two findings:
They find that girls build comparative advantage in non-STEM fields as early as grade 3, outperforming boys in English but not in Math.
Parents invest more in girls than in boys at early ages, and these investments are more strongly correlated with English than Math scores.
But, not only that, these two findings are correlated.
In exploring why these gaps arise early, they find that parents’ beliefs are more optimistic for girls than boys, and girls have better self-regulation skills at early ages than boys, which may make them easier to teach.
Why is there a stronger link between parental investment and English, compared to Math? Their data cannot answer such questions. However, one possibility is that investments at early ages tend to focus more on reading than on math (Cannon and Ginsburg, 2008).
Wait, what?
Yes, you understood that well.
At early age, girls have better self-regulations skills than boys and parents spend more time and resources to educate them.
But, this early education is mostly focused on reading.
This results in girls having an advantage early on in language arts.
And, it’s human to further advance in what we are good at.
What can you do?
No, this doesn’t mean you should not invest in your daughters’ early education.
But, just be more versatile.
If you read her books, find some with STEM topics.
Buy toys that help her build other skills.
Enroll her in some sports activities. Remember, at an early age, kids develop also through acquiring physical skills.
Be broad in bulding her skills and allow her to make her own choice of preference. This newsletter will surely help you with it.
Thanks for reading! If you liked this, please share it with parents who want to mindfully prepare their daughters for the new digital age.