Wanoah

I recently wrote about Ada Lovelace Day and I men­tioned in passing that girls tend to ini­tially sur­pass boys  at math­em­at­ics in school. Then some­thing hap­pens, and girls almost entirely dis­ap­pear from maths and the sci­ences. I vaguely remembered read­ing about this diver­gence in maths abil­it­ies as chil­dren pro­gress through school some­where, and went look­ing for sources. It seemed like there was this clear cause and effect thing going on: girls dis­ap­pear from the sci­ence dis­cip­lines at school for some reason,  res­ult­ing in a gender imbal­ance in related careers. After writ­ing that, it seemed like a gross sim­pli­fic­a­tion, and I thought I’d try and find out a bit more about what’s going on.

First, some more simplification:

Cour­tesy of xkcd.

I think the comic neatly illus­trates what might be hap­pen­ing. In the interests of full dis­clos­ure, I shall state for the record that I am ter­rible at maths. I always have been. More accur­ately, I am awful at men­tal arith­metic. I struggle to hold on to num­bers in my mind long enough to com­plete a cal­cu­la­tion and I’m very eas­ily dis­trac­ted from the task. Does this make me a girl?

I also never man­aged to learn my mul­ti­plic­a­tion tables. Rote learn­ing has always been a dead end for me: I tend to learn by a vari­ety of means that allow me to under­stand things and link them with other areas. This has always meant that, as long as I’ve applied myself dur­ing classes or lec­tures and inves­ted thought into what I’m doing at the time, I’ve never had to worry about exams or revi­sion. I can learn quickly and I can suc­ceed at exams with rel­at­ively little effort, which is mar­vel­lous.  This has never been help­ful in the slight­est with math­em­at­ics, however.

The prob­lem with hav­ing a long his­tory of suck­ing at men­tal arith­metic is that it under­mines a lot of other things. I never trust my own res­ults. Being put on the spot makes me stop func­tion­ing entirely. Back in school, maths les­sons were long drawn-out exer­cises in ter­ror as I prayed that I wouldn’t be asked a ques­tion. Indeed, a recent study has demon­strated the effect of such anxi­ety on the abil­ity to do basic maths:

“Math anxi­ety, ‘the feel­ing of fear and dread of per­form­ing math­em­at­ical cal­cu­la­tions,’ can neg­at­ively affect math­em­at­ical tasks much sim­pler and more basic than pre­vi­ously thought. In the study, par­ti­cipants were asked to count black squares on a white screen. The num­ber of squares shown ranged from one to nine and par­ti­cipants were given as much time as they wanted before answer­ing. When the num­ber of squares was in the subit­iz­ing range (one to four), both math-anxious and non-math-anxious par­ti­cipants per­formed equally well, but when the num­ber of squares was in the count­ing range (five to nine), the math-anxious group took longer and were less accur­ate.” [1]

This is cer­tainly some­thing I can per­son­ally relate to. Con­fid­ence being the neb­u­lous thing that it is, it’s not hard to ima­gine that a degree of cul­tural bias towards your entire gender play­ing a role in erod­ing that con­fid­ence. It might not be as bald as the car­toon above; it could be very subtle in terms of atti­tude from teach­ers, par­ents, other role mod­els, and peers.

Once you have estab­lished that belief that you can­not do maths, it’s very hard to over­come it. We start off with basic arith­metic as the found­a­tion for maths. You can’t dis­pute that it is a neces­sary and worth­while thing to have. Com­pet­ence in arith­metic, or the lack thereof, does not neces­sar­ily cor­rel­ate with abil­ity at the more advanced math­em­at­ics, how­ever. You can be com­pletely use­less at mul­ti­plic­a­tion in your head, but per­fectly able to solve more com­plex prob­lems. It’s more likely to be the lack of self-belief that hinders you: you’ve already decided that you’re poor at maths, there­fore you are poor at maths. I couldn’t tell you what 7 x 8 is, but I took Maths GCSE a year early and I got a B, so I’m per­haps not as bad as I think I am. Equally, if I hadn’t been taught in small groups and if I hadn’t been gen­er­ally aca­dem­ic­ally con­fid­ent due to suc­cess in other sub­jects, it could so eas­ily have gone the other way. I’d be will­ing to bet it does go the other way for a lot of people.

I don’t believe that there is any func­tional or bio­lo­gical reason why girls would be out­per­formed by boys in math­em­at­ics or any other sci­ence dis­cip­line, des­pite some of the more per­sist­ent myths here. I can accept that simple bio­logy coupled with gender roles might lead to other dis­par­it­ies between genders on aver­age: career earn­ings, for example, will inev­it­ably be affected by the decision to have chil­dren. What I don’t accept is that there might be a func­tional dif­fer­ence in men­tal capa­city for the sort of think­ing required for the sci­ences. I don’t think that women are irra­tional and incap­able of logical thought, even if I laugh at the many jokes based on this very notion. Broadly, I think the dif­fer­ences between the sexes amount to little. We have more in com­mon as gender groups than not. Let’s look at maths test scores and a nice bell curve to sup­port that:

Some girls are very good at maths and so are some boys. Some boys are bad at maths and so are some girls. The over­lap is much lar­ger than the dif­fer­ence. [2]

His­tor­ic­ally, there was a per­cep­tion that boys were bet­ter at maths than girls. I sus­pect that a lot of people still believed that when I was at school in the Eighties, includ­ing many teach­ers. I prob­ably believed it myself, not know­ing any bet­ter. In the early Nineties, research indic­ated that girls actu­ally per­formed bet­ter than boys at maths at an early age. Once things pro­gressed to the more com­plex maths, girls’ per­form­ance declined sig­ni­fic­antly versus boys:

“…Meas­ur­able dif­fer­ences exis­ted for com­plex problem-solving begin­ning in the high school years (d = +0.29 favor­ing males), which might fore­cast the under-representation of women in sci­ence, tech­no­logy, engin­eer­ing, and math­em­at­ics (STEM) careers.” [3]

Why would that have been? Could it be that con­fid­ence was under­mined by the faulty assump­tions of their teach­ers: that com­mon wis­dom that girls suck at maths? There are an array of myths to con­tend with that per­sist to the present day. “Girls are qual­it­at­ive; boys are quant­it­at­ive.” “You’re too pretty to study maths.” Both are untrue, but say it enough and some people will start to believe it.

There is a belief in a “maths gene” that is gender-related. Sim­il­arly, there is a dis­missive atti­tude towards hor­mones and hor­monal beha­viour that is endemic in our soci­ety. This can lead to a mar­gin­al­isa­tion of girls in the sci­entific dis­cip­lines, and even in an enlightened edu­ca­tional envir­on­ment, there are still the beliefs of par­ents and peer groups to con­tend with. What’s the net res­ult if par­ents have lower expect­a­tions of their daugh­ters when it comes to the sci­ence fields?

Role mod­els are an import­ant factor for girls. OK, so pos­it­ive role mod­els are import­ant for all chil­dren and young adults, but a 2006 study found that role mod­els are more of a factor for females than males, and sig­ni­fic­antly, females need role mod­els of the same gender. This doesn’t mean that maths and sci­ence teach­ers need to be women to reach girls, but that aware­ness of suc­cess­ful women in the field can serve as inspir­a­tion. Which leads us back to the Ada Lovelace Day…

It seems like there is much to be done, but it also seems that much has already been achieved:

“Our ana­lysis shows that, for grades 2 to 11, the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion no longer shows a gender dif­fer­ence in math skills, con­sist­ent with the gender sim­il­ar­it­ies hypo­thesis. […] Gender dif­fer­ences in math per­form­ance, even among high scorers, are insuf­fi­cient to explain lop­sided gender pat­terns in par­ti­cip­a­tion in some STEM fields.“[3]

In con­clu­sion, there are no func­tional dif­fer­ences between the genders when it comes to maths and sci­ence dis­cip­lines. In terms of demon­strated abil­ity, females look to have caught up with their male coun­ter­parts over the last twenty years, but in terms of num­bers, they remain a minor­ity in the related fields. We need to con­tinue dis­pelling the old myths that are dis­missive of girls’ abil­it­ies and we need to over­come tra­di­tional gender bar­ri­ers by provid­ing inspir­a­tional examples of success.

1. Math­em­at­ics Anxi­ety Affects Count­ing But Not Subit­iz­ing Dur­ing Visual Enu­mer­a­tion — Erin Malo­ney, Jonathan Fugels­ang, Evan Risko, Daniel Ansari

2. Girls Are… Boys Are… : Myths, Ste­reo­types & Gender Dif­fer­ences — Patri­cia B. Camp­bell, Jen­nifer N. Storo

3. Gender Sim­il­ar­it­ies Char­ac­ter­ize Math Per­form­ance — Janet S. Hyde, Sara M. Lind­berg, Mar­cia C.  Linn, Amy B. Ellis, Car­oline C. Williams