Author: Evan Fleischer / Source: Big Think
- Looking at data in the U.K. suggests that the more girls play video games, the greater the chances they’ll pursue a STEM degree, regardless of what kind of game they play.
- Currently, there is a dearth of women taking up STEM degrees.
- Although it isn’t clear whether there is a causal relationship here, encouraging girls to play more video games may also encourage them to study STEM subjects.
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 suggests a strong correlation between girls who are heavy gamers and the likelihood those girls will go on to pursue STEM degrees.
Anesa Hosein at the University of Surrey wrote a paper for Computers in Human Behavior that looked at survey results from 481 females and 333 males concluding 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 on which Hosein based her analysis came from two different data sets. The first was the Net Generation data set, which contains information on students in their first year of university life,…
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