A new study into causes of the scarcity of women in technical and scientific fields says that it is not discrimination by men in the field keeping the ladies away. Nor is it a repugnance felt by women for possibly dishevelled or unhygienic male nerds.It's also why they don't write hard science fiction. As I pointed out ten years ago.
No, the reason that young women don't train in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) areas - and thus, don't find themselves with jobs at tech companies, in IT etc - is quite simply that they mostly don't know enough maths to do those courses.
"It is all about the mathematical content of the field. Girls not taking math coursework early on in middle school and high school are set on a different college trajectory than boys,” says economics prof Donna Ginther.
Ginther and a colleague, Shulamit Kahn, examined statistics on young women's maths qualifications and mathematical requirements for college courses in America. Put simply, they found that absence of women studying a given course can be accounted for simply by the fact that most young women don't know much maths.
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