

What about the women?  - sb2nov
http://tech.coursera.org/blog/2014/03/08/what-about-the-women/

======
facepalm
It bothers me how some of those charts lend themselves to possibly wrong
conclusions. For example women tend to score higher in courses with more
women. But it seems unlikely that men suppress women in courses, thereby
lowering their scores. For one thing, students don't tend to interact that
much in those courses. And a couple of charts earlier they showed a strong
difference in percentage of women in, say, humanities vs engineering. That
seems like a much more likely cause.

At the end of the day, these are free courses, so it seems unlikely there are
less women because they are excluded in some way. Lack of interest seems the
more likely cause.

~~~
2plus2make5
You're right that it would be wrong to conclude that men suppress women in
courses -- certainly we found no evidence of that (I helped write the post).
As we note in the post, while the correlation is unequivocal, causality is
complex and worthy of further study.

------
minimaxir
This was flagged off the front page, which is rather unfortunate.

From the "Gender and Performance" chart, the distribution of the values
appears to have a correlation of 0, so I'm not sure how a positive correlation
is inferred.

~~~
doeth
Thanks for the question! The correlation here is r=0.38 with a p-value <
2e-15. We've added this note to the post.

(Note: I'm one of the authors of the post.)

