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0 pointsJensson4y ago0 comments

That is for high school students, at that point the ceiling is too low to notice any talents. Getting good grades in high school has more to do with consistency than anything else. They talked about university students, but excluded them from the study for a variety of reasons, so it is just for high school students and subjects.

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woodruffw4y ago· 2 in thread

That isn't a particularly satisfying excuse here, given that (1) supposedly innate qualities don't disappear in high school, and (2) the history of human civilization is dominated by cultures in which teenagers are considered adults for the purposes of working, warring, &c. Put another way: the historical record considers "talents" to be present in human beings well into the age at which we send kids to high school in developed, industrialized countries.

JenssonOP4y ago

High school STEM courses have a very low bar, grades in them doesn't say much about someone. It is more about being careful and never screwing up than being excellent at the material since there are so many easy STEM courses in high school. For example, a lazy genius might get all A's in math but get a B in chemistry. There is no better grade than A in math, so a typical hard working high schooler with A in every course will look better in this study even if the other person is actually way better at math and aces the SAT and places well in math competitions.

And if we do look at stuff like SAT or math competitions then it is basically just men, very few women at the top there. So it looks like women do better when the ceiling is so low that the male variability doesn't show.

woodruffw4y ago

The reciprocal of this claim is that STEM classes in college have a high bar, which is a doozy of an assumption. But even this drags us away from the really egregious assumption here, which is that any measured variability is innate rather than socialized.