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Re:I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Ap... by mncharity on Monday August 14, 2017 @07:38PM (#15014031)
> When a student fail a exam at a university level, the risk that they will switch program is several time higher if their gender is a minority in their class.

Belonging interventions can have a startlingly large impact this kind of failure mode.

Instilling "college is hard for people - they work hard, get help, and succeed" reframes difficulty from "I guess I don't belong here", affecting outcomes at scale. http://gregorywalton-stanford.weebly.com/uploads/4/9/4/4/494...

Two Brief Interventions to Mitigate a “Chilly Climate” Transform Women’s Experience, Relationships, and Achievement in Engineering http://gregorywalton-stanford.weebly.com/uploads/4/9/4/4/494... is interesting - two different ways of improving outcomes, with very different secondary effects.

The many questions of belonging. (2017, book chapter) http://gregorywalton-stanford.weebly.com/uploads/4/9/4/4/494...

More on http://gregorywalton-stanford.weebly.com/research.html and http://gregorywalton-stanford.weebly.com/papers.html .

Re:I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Ap... by belorn on Tuesday August 15, 2017 @03:57AM (#15016304)
Interesting, the first study suggest that a single general session to prepare students can reduce the problem by 31-40%. If such single session training could be pushed down the ages, say around the age of 18, it could have a noticeable effect on gender segregation. The 31-40% effect is in regard to the demographic that already had picked a program/direction, but it seems to have potential in addressing one major cause of gender segregation.

The second study only look at half the population, only during the first year of college, and the result they measure were GPA. Those are severe limitations if we are looking for a general solution to a problem that both genders suffer from. That said, social-belonging intervention in education seems useful in particular since bullying is still a major issue at all levels of education, and stress management also seems useful in a place where stress is creeping down the ages.

Thanks for the book. The summery was in particular a good read, highlighting both success and failures in prescribed solutions. If there is a one failure mode of physiological experiments that often seems ignored, it is the effect of false hope and empty charades. The recentness of the cited references implies there is a lot of more work to be done in the field in finding general solutions.