Despite decades of campaigns to promote female engineers, computer scientists, and role models like Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer or former Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker, women are still underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) professions. A new study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that the tendency for women to avoid these careers may be due to unintentional teacher bias during their early school years.
The study, conducted by Victor Lavy and Edith Sand, followed three separate groups of Israeli students for six years, from middle school through the end of high school. Exams were given twice for all subjects—one to be graded by the students’ teachers who knew their identities, and the other evaluated by instructors who had no identifying information.
As it turns out, girls systematically outscored boys on average for mathematics exams, but only when graded anonymously. If the teacher knew the identity of the student being graded, however, the girls’ scores were lower on average than the boys’ results.
This difference only appeared in math and science exams, with insignificant differences in “humanities” classified subjects. This result led Lavy and Sand to conclude that teachers imposed subconscious gender bias on their students, underestimating girls’ ability to perform in STEM subjects and overestimating that of the boys.
Lavy and Sand also examined course choices later in these students' academic careers, finding that male students tended to take advanced math and science classes more frequently than their female counterparts. After controlling external variables, the researchers concluded that girls—having received subtle discouragement from teachers in the form of uniformly lower test scores in middle school—had been influenced by their teachers’ biases to believe they couldn’t succeed as well in STEM classes as boys.
As Lavy told the New York Times, “It goes a long way to showing it’s not the students or the home, but the classroom teacher’s behavior that explains part of the differences over time between boys and girls” in STEM-related fields. (Note that the study did find minor variations between family structures, particularly for students whose fathers are better educated than their mothers and for girls from lower socioeconomic levels, but overall, the teacher’s effect on girls’ self-perception remains potent on later academic and career choices.)
Couple this study with reports of low percentages of female employees at Silicon Valley’s top companies and the low levels of female students sitting for advanced STEM exams like The College Board’s Advanced Placement Computer Science exam—only 18.5% of those who took the exam were young women last year—and people may start to wonder whether the low numbers of female STEM students at any educational level is due to ability or bias.
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Additional ISM resources:
Research: STEM Attrition: College Students' Paths Into and Out of STEM Fields
ISM Monthly Update for Division Heads Vol. 9 No. 5 From Neuroscience: Why Gaming Engages Students
Additional ISM resources for Gold Consortium members:
I&P Vol. 39 No. 16 Establishing Student Achievement Levels
I&P Vol. 36 No. 9 The 21st Century School: Fairness, Competitiveness, and High Performance
