It makes sense to me, based on my own limited personal experience as a college prof (teaching CS). Particularly for our intro classes, it's fairly common for a male student to struggle all semester and scrape by with a D-, then without hesitation declare his intention to be a CS major. At the same time, a female will get a B or A- and walk away apparently thinking "I guess I'm just not good at this and CS just isn't for me."

This is all just my impression, of course, from a small sample size. Still, we've had very good results improving our male/female ratio just by have a short 1-minute chat with each student that gets above a B, praising their work and encouraging them to consider CS as a major.

Does that male student actually become a STEM practitioner, or do they just flunk out at a later date than the female? It's unclear that female behavior here is what needs to be fixed. Perhaps men should drop out more.

Another possibility is that both behaviors are correct responses to different incentives. Males generally have far lower social value than females, so for the male it might be STEM or bust. In contrast, the female has options like moving into a non-competitive profession and then get married to an engineer/lawyer/doctor/banker. So for the female, the marginal value of STEM over her next best choice might be a lot lower than the male.

> Males generally have far lower social value than females

Probably because men are more willing to marry down socioeconomically, although this is changing and may move further in the direction of equality in the future.

This is not generally what has happened so far - so far women's rise has driven assortative mating rather than women marrying down.

I think this is (in the long haul) a good thing, provided we can encourage high intellect couples to reproduce. It'll generate a high IQ upper caste who will be natural leaders for society.

Men have become more socioeconomically selective, at least to a greater extent than women have become less selective. I think you and I are in agreement there.

100% agree that men should also probably drop out more. I did, but many others continued, only becoming disillusioned, frustrated and ending up in completely non-STEM fields in large numbers. That being said, addressing barriers to career choice earlier in life is important so people can start becoming passionate before the opportunity to explore them (at traditional educational stages) passes them by.

That one rang a little too close to home. The reason I chose math was it was the hard subject that I could reliably overcome. Meaning, while I still had a hard time with concepts, I could eventually get there. I liked the challenge even if it hurt my GPA at times. Meanwhile I overheard many engineers group working on homework (copying one another) to ensure their GPAs were never in question.

Some of this is in the eye of the beholder. I've seen people working 10+ hours in a class and still end up with an A, but found the process mentally exhausting. Others might barely work at it and end up with an A-, and think that it was pretty easy.

At least in my experience as a math major undergraduate, calculus was a class that introduces students to rigorous proofs and new lines of thinking, but in examination seldom tests students on proof-ability. Later classes such as Real/Complex Analysis are where you are expected to produce proofs during examinations. So I would not be surprised if some people 'saw the writing on the wall' in that they could solve problems on examinations but were lost on the theoretical content.

Oddly enough, (also anecdotal) I'll mention that STEM majors in the hard sciences and mathematics seemed far less obsessed about GPA than many other majors. So a Bio major (especially if they were pre-med), for instance, would be much more stressed about upcoming examinations than the math or physics folks.

From what I've seen, the GPA obsession tends to be common to all students trying for some sort of grad/med/law school, and therefore not tied to major. Non-grad-school bound students, by contrast, are typically much more relaxed.

GPA matters a lot in some industries—plenty of finance firms won't look at you if you are below their treshold. We're spoiled in that someone with a 2.8 Comp Sci GPA can still get a dev job.

That said, GPA obsession is a thing in high school, regardless of future plans, so it carries to college even in majors/paths where it doesn't matter.

I was also under the impression that kids who plan out STEM majors typically bypass single variable (Calc I) and other freshman intro programs through advanced placement. https://www.cmu.edu/mcs/prospective/ap.html as an example

It's not measuring performance at calculus. It's measuring confidence in performance at calculus. This is where sexism and all those icky social things come into play. Most women have spent their lives up to that point hearing subtle and not-subtle variations of "girls can't math". So even if they're good at it, they tend to believe they aren't.

Meanwhile, college-age men tend to be brimming with confidence, walking examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Even if they're not good at calculus, they often think they are. This is partly a result of a society that says, directly and indirectly, that people like them are natural rulers.

That's how sexism works, in both directions.

Not sure which is bigger effect here - cultural or physiological. It just can have something to do with testosterone which male students have higher levels than female. Here is an example of article describing effect of testosterone on confidence: http://www.everydayhealth.com/low-testosterone/how-low-testo...

Girls get better grades but don't do as well on tests. It's easy to see where the confidence gap comes from.