Study: girls playing video games are a gateway drug to STEM degrees
Note: this was published elsewhere last year.
If you’re a parent who wants to encourage their daughter to pursue science, engineering, or math, then it might do well for you to let your child loose on Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, Fortnite, Fallout 76, The Sims, Spiderman, or even something properly ‘indie’ like Kentucky Route Zero. Why? Research has been done that suggests a strong correlation between girls who are heavy gamers and the likelihood with which those girls will go on to pursue STEM degrees.
Anesa Hosein at the University of Surrey has a paper in “Computers in Human Behavior” that looked at survey results for 481 females and 333 males and concluded that girls between the ages of 13–14 who played more than nine hours of video games a week were more likely to pursue a STEM degree. This pattern did not hold true for young boys.
The data from which Hosein is basing her analysis comes from two different data sets: the first is something called a ‘Net Generation’ dataset. The other is called LSYPE — as in, a ‘Longitudinal Study Of Young People in England,’ the latter of which came in 7 different waves between the ages of 13/14 and 19/20. And though — as Hosein herself notes — “there is an oversampling of adolescents entering higher education … it is still able to provide…
