Thread by @BradleyKBusch

A 🧵 exploring gender differences in education. Nationally, girls do better, are more likely to go to Uni, but are less likely to do STEM subjects. What causes these differences?

First 4 studies on parenting, second 6 on schooling. Strap in, some of these findings are wild…

Study 1 👶🏻 - it starts early. Researchers asked mothers to estimate how steep a slope their babies could crawl up. Despite equal ability, mothers of daughters underestimated (14 degrees), whereas mothers of sons overestimated (20 degree slopes) pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11063631/

Study 2 🗣 Parental praise. Although receiving the same amount from parents, the type of praise young boys/girls receive differs. 24% of praise boys receive is for their process (efforts + strategy), for girls it is 10%. This impacts mindset 5 years later! ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

Study 3 🧮 Despite similar performance of boys/girls, parents of daughters thought their child had to work harder to do well in math than parents of sons. Parents of sons thought advanced math was more important for their child than parents of daughters ☹️ psycnet.apa.org/record/1982-22…

Study 4 🇺🇸. Parents of sons are more likely to attend school meetings and have contact with teachers when they have a son. This study also found that parents are likely to have saved more money to further their son’s education 💰 annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.114…

Study 5 🗑. How much do boys vs girl value education? According to The OECD, they found that boys are 8% more likely than girls to say that school is a “waste of time” oecd.org/pisa/keyfindin…

Study 6 📉. How students think their adults thinks. This study found that girls from age 4 and boys from age 7 thought adults believed that boys are academically inferior to girls. This belief negatively affected boys reading, writing and maths test scores srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.111…

Study 7 🤡. In the first year of school, boys who were ‘playful’ were more likely to be labelled as the ‘class clown’. Interestingly, this label was not assigned to the playful girls in the group. This affects how other students view these students. frontiersin.org/articles/10.33…

Study 8 🧑‍🏫. A report for the Institute of Education looked at teacher perceptions. Despite getting the same scores, teachers rated the reading ability of boys and the maths ability of girls to be less likely to be above average. cambridge.org/core/journals/…

Study 9👩‍🔬. When girls are exposed to role models (e.g. advanced peers, professionals and professors in STEM subjects), there was an increase in their self-concept in STEM, attitudes towards STEM, effort put into tests and motivation to pursue STEM careers semanticscholar.org/paper/STEMing-…

Study 10 👭. Girls and boys start the year rating STEM as their favourite subject at similar levels (~20%) but this changes over the year (15% vs 19%). This is partly due to their peer groups attitude towards subject and likelihood to choose it next year. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…

Final thought. Big differences in expectations and behaviour towards boys vs girls exists. This impacts their grades and attitudes towards subjects and their ability. But good news is these differences aren’t biologically, meaning we can affect them. Lots of work to do!

P.s. If you are interested in this area, I can not recommend @mr_englishteach’s books enough. Both have been an eye opener for me. Treat yourself this bank holiday and order them on Amazon.