Re:In a study of senior CS majors, U.S. students are tops in...
by charlesbradshaw on Tuesday March 19, 2019 @05:14PM
(#19435956)
The paper disappoints me because they attempt to think of all the explanatory variables for the differences between countries, then they turn to gender and end on a chart.It's impossible to read the paper and come away with the impression that whites are simply better at coding, because the authors give so much context to their findings.
I am agnostic to the cause of the gender difference, and clearly this study didn't have enough information to give any insights. That's why I find it so unsatisfying that they would put up a chart and mention gender differences if they weren't interested or capable of expanding on the results beyond "[...] more effort is needed to attract higher-achieving female students into CS."
The deltas between genders are quite a bit smaller than those between nationalities, though!
I mean, sure, I guess you could trigger the proverbial SJWs by pointing out the fact that a US woman is about a third of a standard deviation worse than her male classmates. But it's hard to draw firm conclusions about gender when Chinese and Indian men are at an even larger handicap relative to her.
I mean, I gotta flip this around here: why do you feel like we should be focusing on a small subsignal when the data supports a clearer, more defensible, and more hypothesis-rich conclusion about something else?