Education a la Carte

[differenceblog]

Wilson et al (1994) suggested that girls and boys may have different motivations for selecting the courses they choose to study. Wilson surveyed a group of 947 "gifted adolescents" in a three-week academic program, and asked them why they chose the courses they did. Girls were more likely than boys to report choosing a class because it was

Comments

[ukelele]

""gifted adolescents" in a three-week academic program"? Hmmm...CTY by any chance

[ukelele]

s/TIP, not Duke/TIP, not CTY/;

[differenceblog]

For what it's worth, I thought the abstract far overstated the results. If you're interested, I'd be happy to send you the full paper.

[ukelele]

Or possibly a false dichotomy? One of the things I note about my tech-educated friends is that the women are way more likely to have serious interests in non-technical fields, and to contemplate and perhaps actively pursue a much wider range of career options. (I speculate this is in part because women don't have the pressue to be breadwinners that men do; nonnihil says it's because women are just better; who am I to contradict him? ;)

This is a long-winded way of saying that perhaps nontechnically educated women *also* feel they have a wide range of options and are not necessarily interested in the most ambitious-looking or remunerative of them; maybe women who have technical skills look at them as one among many skills they have, and only the ones whose technical skills are so compelling they outweigh other things substantially end up pursuing that path. (And, of course, if you don't pursue it early, it's a lot harder to switch onto, given the education required.)