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hamburger5003 t1_j1rtem8 wrote

Reply to comment by nocuzzlikeyea13 in [OC] Women face greater Imposter Syndrome than Men, when starting Software Engineering Degrees, despite having similar high school averages by GeorgeDaGreat123

It’s a well documented phenomenon over the last few decades with a few possible explanations. It’s hard to search for general studies because most studies seem to be either super specific or more focused on the male/female differences in math and science/reading and writing performance. But here are the major ones I keep seeing cited.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/4120992 I believe the first to prove there is a general gender gap in received grades vs aptitude. Not in here but I believe other studies suggest this trend is present everywhere except Nordic countries.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01425692.2022.2122942 Major study recently to suggest that this gap is systemic.

From personal experience, I can’t give much to secondary school because it was all boys, and my tertiary is a very small male-dominated field, but I distinctly remember my primary school was very sexist against boys in a number of ways, and I would not be surprised if this were also in grades.

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Tasty-Tumbleweed-786 t1_j1u1sc0 wrote

Just a note that grades Vs tests is different from grades Vs aptitude - eg maybe girls don't test as well but are better at coursework/participating in classroom learning?

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hamburger5003 t1_j1unl42 wrote

Good point. It’s hard to differentiate these things. Aptitude is important to measure here because that is generally the goal when it comes to learning skills for careers or life, and they’ll try to measure these learned abilities with aptitude tests. Ie: you might have taken the ‘Scholastic Aptitude Test’ (SAT) in high school. One of the possible considered reasons for this discrepancy is just that males are better at taking tests and/or females are better at classwork, discussed in the first linked study.

From what I understand because I haven’t read more than the abstracts and intros is that the second study was supposed to have accounted for that idea and still found statistical bias.

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