Women score lower than men in high-stakes final exams across advanced undergraduate STEM courses, with mean differences of 2.5 to ~7 points on a 100-point scale¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · associational r2 · q3
Currency · newest study 2025 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q3 i? In a cohort of 315 engineering students, women scored lower than men on final exams in all four advanced STEM courses, with mean differences of 2.5 to ~7 points on a 100-point scale (~0.18–0.49 SD). → Ilana Ram 2025

Evidence¶

Ilana Ram 2025¶

Ilana Ram, Adam Shwartz, Ido Roll. (2025). Minding the gender gap in advanced STEM courses: effects of student preparedness and activity level. Instructional Science (2025) 53:1457–1478. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-025-09748-1

q3 · i? · associational · r2

Analysis of a single cohort of 315 undergraduate electrical engineering students at a leading technological university in Israel, using final exam grades from four advanced STEM courses. The study reports women scored lower than men in all four courses, with mean differences of "2.5 to ~ 7 points on a 100-point scale"; no standardized effect size statistic is printed, so impact is null.

"women scored lower than men in all four courses, with mean differences ranging from 2.5 to ~ 7 points on a 100-point scale (~ 0.18–0.49 SD)."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• A gender gap of ~9 points appears even on a low-stakes diagnostic assessment, contradicting prior findings that the gap disappears in low-stakes assessments
• High-school grades do not capture the preparation gap: controlling for high-school scores did not eliminate the gap, possibly due to a ceiling effect
• Young women outperformed young men in every grading category family in unweighted points, with the largest gap in assignments and smallest in assessments; weighting reversed this ordering
• Higher weights on assessments shrank, but did not eliminate, the gender difference in final grades, because young women were more often in classes weighting assessments heavily
• Once undergraduate-level mathematics and physics preparation is controlled, gender no longer significantly predicts performance in advanced STEM courses — related
• Women scored about 33 SAT-M points lower than men who took the same math course and received the same grade — related
• Women assigned to the chatbot in Microeconomics earned final grades seven points higher than control women, with no treatment effects for men — related
• Women admitted to MIT with lower SAT math scores perform as well as men in freshman math classes — related
• Practice points from active-learning exercises did not inflate final grades; exam points remained the primary determinant of course grade — related