Gender Gap Explained?

This is very interesting:

The study authors, economists Thomas Breda of the Paris School of Economics and Clotilde Napp of the French National Center for Scientific Research, came to this conclusion by analyzing survey data from 300,000 high school students in 64 countries around the world.

“We tried to understand the reasons why we observe so much segregation between girls and boys in terms of fields of study,” Breda said.

They found that among the students who were better at math than at reading, 68% were boys and 32% were girls. On the flip side, among the students who were better at reading than at math, 68% were girls and 32% were boys.

This gender gap could explain why boys are more likely than girls to take the kinds of classes that lead to careers in the so-called STEM fields — science, technology, engineering and math, the researchers reported...

The researchers found that on the whole, boys had a stronger attraction to math classes than girls did. For instance, the proportion of boys who said they wanted to take more math classes instead of more reading classes was nearly 8 percentage points higher than it was for girls. In addition, the proportion of boys who said they intended to “study harder” in math than in reading was almost 6 percentage points higher than it was for girls...

Then the researchers decided to compare each student’s math skills with his or her reading skills. Here, the gender difference was more stark. In looking across the 64 countries, they saw that 59% of boys were better at math than at reading, and that 74% of girls were better at reading than at math, Breda said.

This difference could explain 78% of the gender gap in students’ intent to take more math classes in the future, the economist found.

So the theory is that girls go for "words" classes more because they're better at "words" than they are at "numbers", even if they're very good at "numbers".  Interesting.