Does Gender Define Course Selection?

The purpose of this project is to find correlations between the courses students take and their gender. Using these results, Earl Haig Secondary School (EHSS), along with other high schools, might get a more concrete idea of the trends in the academic interests of its students. It is commonly assumed that girls take more social (“soft”) sciences, and boys take more natural (“hard”) sciences. However, does this assumption hold up in the context of a modern high school located in a first world country, specifically, at EHSS? Our project will analyze data from individual students, using their gender and courses to find out which courses are male-dominated (more than 60% male), female-dominated (more than 60% female) or relatively gender-neutral. The results found that the stereotypes of males being interested in physical sciences and education, and females being interested in social sciences and arts are valid. However, the trends are slowly changing as some departments’ classes have started evening out the ratio between males and females.