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Social Sciences› Safety Research› Career Development and Diversity

Education and gender differences — Greater male variability hypothesis for STEM under-representation of women

Submitted 2026-10-22

Field: Social Sciences › Safety ResearchType: No effect foundArea: education and gender differencesTarget: Greater male variability hypothesis for STEM under-representation of womenStage: full study

Hypothesis

The variability hypothesis: boys' grades vary more than girls', putting more males above high-performance thresholds, and this explains why men are over-represented in STEM.

What failed

A meta-analysis of grades from over 1.6 million students confirmed lower variance and higher means for girls, but both the mean and variance gaps were smaller in STEM than in non-STEM subjects. Simulations put equal numbers of girls and boys in the top 10% of STEM classes.

Broken assumption

Greater male variability in school performance is what produces male over-representation in STEM.

Why

The pattern runs the wrong way for the hypothesis: variability differences are weakest exactly where male over-representation is strongest, so they cannot account for it.

From the published paper: O’Dea et al. Nature Communications, 2018. ↗CC BY

Research ideas from this failure

Unvetted lead — read the papers

New hypotheses this failure suggests, each with a crucial experiment, a rival explanation of the original result, and the papers it rests on. Written by AI from paper titles and abstracts found on OpenAlex (and Europe PMC, for life and health sciences).

Related failures

Nothing else logged looks close to this one yet.

Links in published research

Where this experiment's genes are known to matter outside its own research area, and the papers behind those links. Sources: Open Targets Platform and Europe PMC.