Maria Amelia, a high school senior, was a star student in math. When her teacher told her that she should study physics in college, she was shocked and looked embarrassed. The teacher had several discussions with her and found out that Maria Amelia did not feel comfortable being in a mostly male career. She decided she would be an accountant because it was more acceptable to her family.
They found that the grades in same-sex classrooms were 5 percent higher than their peers in coed classrooms.
When I was younger, I attended a girls-only high school in Ecuador. Without boys in class, we were less shy. We felt free to express ourselves and take risks. Personally, I started to participate in class more, and the more I did, the more confident I became. This is true of many of my friends, too, and this confidence remained after we graduated.
Given that those fields have more men than women working in them, it is important to see this benefit of girls-only classes changing cultural attitudes.
They assigned girls to each class and found that those 'in the all-girls classroom were less likely to regard physics as a boys' subject, compared to girls who had been randomly assigned to the coed classroom' (Park, Behrman, and Choi).
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