Those with high verbal and math skills, don't choose STEM
How to encourage girls' interest in tech — Newsletter No. 8
Happy Friday! This week was quite busy, so we are running a bit late, but better late than never :)
Our previous post led to lots of reactions from your side, so we decided to now share some other research related to the topic.
If you haven’t seen it, here is a short summary. It turns out that girls aged between 3 and 5 have better self-regulation abilities, which enables parents to start teaching them earlier than boys. But, what they got taught this early is mostly related to literacy arts, which is giving them the advantage in these fields once they start school. And, with this confidence, they continue building on these skills and think that, because they are not that good at STEM fields, it’s not what they should pursue further. You can read more here.
This next research we’ll present gets to a corresponding conclusion through observing a different age group.
The study tested whether individuals with high math and high verbal ability in 12th grade were more or less likely to choose STEM occupations than those with high math and moderate verbal ability.
The 1,490 subjects participated in two waves of a longitudinal study; one wave was when the subjects were in 12th grade, and the other was when they were 33.
Show me the results
Results revealed that mathematically capable individuals with high verbal skills were less likely to pursue STEM careers than individuals with high math skills but moderate verbal skills.
So — if you are good both at language and math, you are more likely not to choose STEM.
But, that’s not all.
One notable finding was that the group with high math and high verbal ability included more females than males.
This brings us back to the previous conclusion — that verbal ability is affecting the choice of STEM careers.
So, we should reduce girls’ abilities?
No!
We should change the narrative that career opportunities in STEM fields are isolated and geeky.
And this is what we are trying to do with this newsletter. Technology is versatile and diverse, we should showcase it that way as well. And we don’t want our girls to opt out of the professions that not only will be valorized even more in the future, but that will be the ones designing our future.
Thanks for reading! If you liked this, please share it with parents who want to mindfully prepare their daughters for the new digital age.