Gender, social science and statistics anxiety: Is statistics anxiety holding women social scientists back?

This article provides an original analysis of the relationship between statistics anxiety and undergraduate course performance on social science degrees in the UK. In the article we model the relationship between statistics anxiety and course performance and we compare men and women to assess whether female social science students are more adversely affected by statistics anxiety than men. This is important because statistics anxiety is considered to have a negative influence on learning and research shows that women experience greater levels of statistics anxiety than men. The sample comprises undergraduate social science students gathered from ten UK universities (n=331). To check result consistency, we model item missing responses with imputation. The results indicate that higher levels of statistics anxiety recorded by women are not associated with poorer course performance. One pedagogical implication of this is that teachers of introductory methods courses should themselves not be over anxious about student anxiety.